Forum / Kurt Vonnegut

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 24, 04:54pm

Just curious about opines concerning Vonnegut. I read most of what he'd written over the years that he was active, generally at the time of each work's publication after Slaughterhouse Five.

Personally, my favorite novel of his was "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, maybe because it resembled something Saroyan might have written under the influence of some really good Columbian herb. In it Vonnegut displays more of the mensch than in his other work.

I'm just curious about what other think of him, especially the view of younger people. Knowing the times and the spirit thereof in which his stuff appeared gives me a different viewpoint. If you weren't there, how does his work seem to you? Relevant? Striking? Memorable? Or none of the above.

Curious minds want to know.

Darryl Price
Nov 24, 05:52pm

Reading Vonnegut was fun, like you were getting away with something, like you shared a secret delight with a roomful of strangers. His books surprised me in that he could take the time to be silly,make a point, or in all seriousness complete a circle of thought. He broke rules, which I liked, and he came off like Dylan in interviews, mysterious,winking,playful and devious. I've always thought Tom Robbins must have been a devotee, maybe not, but it's that same vein of literary slapstick and serious art all mashed together that keeps his books alive for me, and at the time, he played the role of the naughty smart kid who could write rings around the stodgy teacher any day. Perhaps that grows old in the end--everything else does, but we need these kinds of guys, who learned all the rules and then just as easily forgot them or invented new ones. Who cares if it was out of boredom or sheer will? It worked,entertained and inspired.

Foster Trecost
Nov 24, 07:05pm

I haven't read everything he's written, and none of it at the time of publication, but I liked the things I read. I always had the sense there were two stories...one in the lines and one between the lines. He was skillful like that, and in other ways, too.

Joani Reese
Nov 24, 07:18pm

I was introduced to him in a modern novels class at the University of North Carolina low these many years ago. I read everything he'd ever written after that and couldn't get enough of his irreverent wisdom. His book of essays, "Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons" is still a touchstone for me. He may have complained often and loudly that he didn't get no respect and that may have been why he didn't with some critics, but he deserves a place in the American canon, if not the world canon. He was an American original, and I miss his wise grumping. So it goes...

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 24, 09:13pm

I love Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five. I have a Slaughterhouse-Five tattoo on my left arm. A tombstone emblazoned with Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books I return to again and again.

Frankie Saxx
Nov 25, 02:11am

My introduction to Vonnegut was finding Mother Night on a bookshelf in Connecticut one Thanksgiving holiday. Being the youngest person present that weekend by a good half century, it was a godsend. It blew my little twelve year old mind.

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 25, 04:33pm

Thanks, everyone for responding.

Frankie, Mother Night was one of the darkest pieces ever written. True exemplar of the man's genius, I think, since his art derives from a love, even a passion for the daylight tempered with an intimate knowledge of the shadows in our world, where the mass of mankind dwells.

He never quite tempts us with a mythology that we are all misdirected, unfortunate saints, but that we are the antithesis thereof, neither good nor evil, but hardly able to choose for all the chaos around us.

I don't see Vonnegut as a more contemporary Mark Twain, but as one of the saddest men in our time.

W.F. Lantry
Nov 25, 05:10pm

If you can only read one, read Cat's Cradle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle

Wow!

Jim V
Nov 25, 05:36pm

Cat's Cradle was his best novel.

Jim V
Nov 25, 05:41pm

I'm also a big fan of the underrated The Sirens of Titan. My least favorite was Slapstick, which is a terrible novel, and all the risible garbage he published near the end of his life.

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 25, 06:56pm

"Risible garbage" is probably too broad a brush to apply to an inspecific period of anyone's lifetime body of work, but it's clear that even Vonnegut was aware of the decline in his work, probably the result of treatments for his lifelong battle with depression. But I am no one's apologist and welcome opinions of all sorts.

Vonnegut gave himself a "D" as a grade for Slapstick, but there is, even in that novel, the germ of some provocative altruistic yearning.

What I'd really love to know is the possibility in his work of lasting appeal beyond his generations.

I recently ran across a fine and insightful article on Vonnegut... more a paean of sorts to his prose, but something to think about:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/15-things-kurt-vonnegut-said-better-than-anyone-el,1858/

Darryl Price
Nov 26, 05:25pm

I'd have to agree with Cat's Cradle but I've always loved Player Piano.

stephen hastings-king
Nov 27, 12:53am

I like the flow Vonnegut could muster. I don't necessarily find the books engaging as books, though. Lovely sentences turn up everywhere, even in books I read but remember nothing about.

Slaughterhouse Five is pretty great.

There's probably no way to really know how his work might circulate in the future or how it'll be taken. There was a fairly extended period during which Richard Brautigan was understood as so tied to a period that his work would never speak to others---I think that even contributed to his suicide---but as it turned out, that's not the case. Maybe it just took a long time for the sentences to be readable differently. And they're lovely sentences. It's hard to know what the conditions are that might enable such a change, and still less what kind of agency might contribute to it. For example, I don't think Brautigan has much of an academic reception still, but his work is pretty well known among most of the writers I know. Especially younger ones. Go figure.

Frankie Saxx
Nov 27, 01:16am

Oh god, I haven't thought about Brautigan in years. Years. I found a copy of his In Watermelon Sugar in a used bookstore so long ago -- before college, so long ago. I have no idea what happened to that book. I wonder how much of his stuff is in ebooks. (Trout Fishing has to be, right?)

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 27, 01:50am

Always looked forward to every new book written by Brautigan as it appeared. I was never disappointed.

I learned from Brautigan's writing that you could write about anything, absolutely anything... even a loaf of bread, and still give it a quality that transcends anything of 'real' importance.

He broke ground for many writers in the '60's. Unfortunately, too many of his imitators lacked the compassion that existed so perfectly, quietly at ease in his strange vocabulary of images.

Much of his poetry is lost. That's a shame.

A Brautigan revival wouldn't hurt.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 27, 05:53am

I'm reading and loving In Watermelon Sugar.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 27, 05:55am

We walked back to iDEATH, holding hands. Hands are very nice things, especially after they have travelled back from making love.

(excerpt from In Watermelon Sugar)

Richard Brautigan

Jane Flett
Nov 27, 08:37am

Oh! Richard Brautigan. I think everyone should sit down sometimes with Revenge of the Lawn and a soft, quiet afternoon and blow their mind with the perfectness. Immediate stories that come to mind are The Weather in San Fransisco (http://www.revolversf.com/blogs/news/1622432-daily-inspiration-the-weather-of-san-francisco) and I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone (http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2007/09/this-saturday-a-9/). Wow.

Kurt Vonnegut is fantastic too, I need to reread everything. Or I need to stop distracting myself with books and write instead.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 27, 09:17am

Going to order Revenge of the Lawn right now. Thanks, Jane!

Oh the books are piling up around me. It's ridiculous. I'm reading Suttree. I'm reading A General Theory of Love. I'm reading my old journals. And Salmonella Men on Planet Porno arrived in yesterday's post.

I can feel my next novel. I'm telling it to please shut the hell up.

Frankie Saxx
Nov 27, 12:46pm

Are you liking Suttree?

Jim V
Nov 27, 01:45pm

"Vonnegut gave himself a "D" as a grade for Slapstick, but there is, even in that novel, the germ of some provocative altruistic yearning."

I don't care about his intentions or what his yearnings were. Nor do I care what he graded himself. I care about a good story well told, and Slapstick is not that.

If I was too inspecific about the risible garbage, let me be clearer. The cringe-worthy, blog-like crap he was publishing in God Bless You, Dr Kervorkian.

Jim V
Nov 27, 01:58pm

By the way, I don't think Vonnegut's work will hold up well over time. Too gimmicky. I think the better novels-- Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse 5-- will be read for 20-50 years after his death, and then they will be curiosities, more interesting for their narrative structure and politics than anything, thrown over for newer fad writers by the universities who largely carried Vonnegut to his fame. After 50 years, only a few specialists read him. 50 years after that, nobody.

Jim V
Nov 27, 02:24pm

I take that back. It wasn't God Bless You Dr Kervorkian. I was thinking about A Man Without a Country.

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 27, 03:23pm

Misti, what do you think of Suttree? Never read it. Is it as good as people say?

Darryl Price
Nov 27, 04:27pm

I agree with Revenge of the Lawn. And Brautigan will rise again because his writing will not disappear. Some kid somewhere is gonna pick it up and be inspired to the max and become the next great writer and when he or she does they will remind the world of Richard's contribution to it.And then others will join in. We used to sell his books every day and limited editions at My Back Pages--they always sold completely out.Now they are almost impossible to get, but they were very cool. I remember one actually came with a seed packet attached to it,that was a book of poetry I believe. Why all the hate for Kurt? He did his thing. He wrote. He invented Vonnegut. No small feat.

Frankie Saxx
Nov 27, 06:13pm

James: I really enjoyed Suttree. It was the second Cormac McCarthy novel I read, after The Road. (My order for reading things is often determined by when the library has them in.)

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 27, 06:25pm

Frankie and James, I am loving Suttree. I read The Road last year. The two novels could not be more different. I found The Road much more accessible. I had difficulty getting into Suttree at first but now it's flowing. I love the language.

James Claffey
Nov 27, 07:46pm

sutree is my favorite. early work, echoes of joyce. great book. worth a visit to knoxville to soak it all in...

Gloria Garfunkel
Nov 27, 08:29pm

He was my favorite in high school in the sixties and he was the favorite of my two sons forty years later. I worked for Delacorte Press right out of college and would watch him come and go and swoon. I also love his son Mark Vonnegut for coming out about his bipolar disorder.

Gloria Garfunkel
Nov 27, 08:31pm

Oops! I meant twenty years later. I'm not that old.

Joani Reese
Nov 27, 09:04pm

If we're getting into McCarthy, Blood Meridian is one of the three finest books I have ever read, and that's saying a lot considering I had no idea exactly how it ended. It contains some of the most gorgeously crafted sentences I have ever had the pleasure to savor. Reading it was like reading one sprawling prose poem. He's a master.

Misti Rainwater-Lites
Nov 27, 09:31pm

Will add Blood Meridian to my serpentine wish list at amazon.

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 27, 10:28pm

Blood Meridian is my favorite novel. A masterpiece.

Joani Reese
Nov 27, 11:38pm

James-- I am so pleased you feel the same way I do about that book. Gary and I constantly argue about McCarthy. He's a Pynchon man, I am not... (neither a man nor a fan of Pynchon).

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 28, 02:32am

Never much of a Pynchon fan either. Blood Meridian has a raw power that feels like McCarthy might have tapped the spine of America. When I read it, I lived and reveled in the Southwest anyway, so the feel of it was always perfectly in tune with mountains and deserts of New Mexico, Arizona.

Regardless of that connection, it has mythic beauty in the language and its theme is almost Biblical, like the epic struggle of Melville's work at it's best... a morality play replete with the Devil and his son.

The language is perfect, the dialogue sublime, the story powerful. Yeah, I like it a lot.

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 28, 02:33am

its best.... sheesh

Gary V. Powell
Nov 30, 01:30am

Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five knocked me out, but I was just a kid then, and I fear that James Valvis may be right about Vonnegut's place in history. I've read all of McCarthy I could find. Suttree was dark to the point it was almost inpenetrable, but worth the effort. Blood Meridian stands atop the heap. At least the American heap.

stephen hastings-king
Nov 30, 04:06am

I read Brautigan when I was a kid and saw things that were(almost) entirely different than I saw when I stumbled across an edition of Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar a couple years ago. For example, the back cover had the word mayonnaise and nothing else. I wouldn't have found that funny when I was younger. Vonnegut strikes me as similar, especially Slaughterhouse Five. I don't know if folk have gone back to his work later in life..I'd be interested in knowing that, and what, if anything, they say differently then than they saw when they were younger and first encountered his writing. With Brautigan, I was surprised at how lovely the sentences are. It prompted me to think about how reading can change, how earlier I read across the sentences instead of reading through them...

So far as McCarthy is concerned, this thread has persuaded me that I have a deficit that may be a pleasure to fill. I look forward to taking care of that.

Matthew Robinson
Nov 30, 07:35am

Suttree is worth a damn. I'm in the small camp that prefers Sut to Blood Meridian, which is not to take anything away from that behemoth of a book.

The first sentence of Suttree is among the finest in all of literature:

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the prim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

eamon byrne
Nov 30, 11:29am

Great to find a thread where we can discuss someone like Vonnegut. I have Cat's Cradle in front of me. Like the others I've read (S5 and his last, Timequake), I find V an interesting but definitely (for me) minor writer. The thing which strikes me about his style is its episodic, meandering nature, and the sense that he doesn't revise or work on his prose. It's very spontaneous, and a little untidy. The opening of Cat's Cradle is brilliant, but then it falls away.

Someone might point me to the book of his where he has this weird dialogue where the character has a conversation with himself: "blah blah" I said. "Yak yak" I replied. Some crazy shit, seems typical of Vonnegut. But he's not original or major like another iconoclast, Burroughs. No way.

James Claffey, I'm so happy for someone to point to Joyce's influence on Cormac McCarthy. (Joyce was the only writer M mentioned in his Oprah interview.) Yes indeed, Suttree is incredibly Joycean. For evidence, here are a couple of examples:

Suttree: … he scooped falling forkfuls toward his underjaw. (172)
Ulysses: His underjaw fell sideways open uncertainly. (40)

Suttree: The gulls rose by ones, by pairs, all flew, bursting upward and wheeling overhead … (408)
Ulysses: The gulls swooped silently two, then all, from their heights, pouncing on prey … they wheeled, flapping weakly. (152)

Also note how both have a fondnes for very rare words.
Ulysses: Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice … (34)
… with the smell of drab abraded leather … (35)

A notable difference between Joyce and McCarthy is that McCarthy relies heavily on similes: "like" is possibly his key word. Joyce hardly ever uses a simile.

Overuse of similes (later novels use them more sparingly?) maybe makes McCarthy tend to overwrite, and this is something too in Joyce and Faulkner. That’s the risk for the reward. But M’s subject matter disguises his affinity to Joyce, whereas not to Faulkner. Unlike those other two, Joyce doesn’t do rape and murder.

One last point about Suttree is that it's the ONLY work of McCarthy that could be classified as a comic one. It's quite different from everything else he's done in this respect. I love it. Maybe it's his masterpiece.

Mathew Paust
Nov 30, 12:56pm

Fascinating discussion. One in which I'm the nose pressed against the window. My tastes are, and I suspect always have been, more literal than poetic. I can barely remember anything of the Vonnegut I read 50 years ago (and I haven't read him since), but I remember how the refrain "and so it goes" annoyed me. Obvious poetic flourishes or stretches of language, while often breathtaking, tend to work as speed bumps when I'm reading prose. They come at me as "Oh, here's the writer being a writer--he's a good writer, a great writer, but..but what the hell happened to the story?"

I'm a story junkie. If the narrator's voice alone engages me--which mostly happens when it's the voice of a storyteller rather than of a poet--I can put up with the occasional rich or playful rif without growing impatient. James Lee Burke and John Steinbeck come to mind. Sometimes the story can come within a greater narrative arc, such as "The Bear" chapter in Go Down Moses. Without "The Bear", the novel might well have left as memory only its title.

But I suspect that were I to revisit Faulkner--which I haven't in years--my more sophisticated understanding of what he was doing would serve us both more generously. The sheer flow of his luxurious verbiage has always seduced me, but only as a good auctioneer's patter (not Billy Mays for chrissakes) can lure potential buyers from their better judgement. Faulkner's Nobel speech has a Sermon-on-the-Mount effect on me every time I read it or hear him deliver it 9on the record I think I lent out and haven't seen in years).

So. Cormac McCarthy? Profoundly good writing, profoundly grim voice. He's the angel of death, and I'm too old to enjoy that country.

Pynchon? Infuriatingly good--took me seven years and 4 serious attempts to fight thru "Rainbow," and it took the same determination to hack my way thru "Moby Dick". "Rainbow" on the whole did more for my psyche than "Dick", maybe because I normally find biblical tone and rhythms uncomfortably self-conscious, plus I knew how it would end (who doesn't?).

"Vineland" has the sense of dread I get from McCarthy but the sparkle of Pynchon's prose keeps the paranoia at bay. Same as it does in "The Crying". Haven't read Mason-Dixon yet but its in the batting order. I may pass on V. Tried it a few times way back, but it just never got a grip.

Anybody read Robert Stone lately? Me neither, but *there* is a storyteller. Grim as McCarthy, yet you (or I) get the sense he's not a sold-out cynic. Still some Grimm (bros.) left in the guy.

[I'm not going back to proof this. Forgive me my errors, friends, as I shall gladly forgive thine.]

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 30, 02:47pm

Eamon, thanks... avoided the interview as I studiously avoid anything even remotely connected to the Oprah... so I didn't get the connection between Joyce and McCarthy.

Primarily because I would never see a connection between them, one so studiously quiet about flesh and blood violence and the other up to his armpits in gore.

I really appreciate your input.

James Lloyd Davis
Nov 30, 02:58pm

I'll be reading Suttree as soon as I finish me own novel. Can't read Cormac McCarthy and write novels in the same time period.

Didn't write much of anything while I first read Blood Meridian and couldn't write at all for damn near a month afterward.

Powerful stuff. Affecting to be sure.

eamon byrne
Dec 01, 02:17am

James, I agree with you that a powerful stylist like McCarthy presents grave dangers to your own wordsmithing-in-progress. Very wise of you to put the pleasure of reading Suttree for another day.

James Claffey
Dec 01, 04:02am

yes, eamon, clear to see mccarthy's early influences at work. a great book nonetheless!

James Claffey
Dec 01, 04:13am

and yes, i agree, it's his masterpiece, suttree...

eamon byrne
Dec 01, 06:15am

Something that strikes me about McCarthy's work is the stylistic shape of it over his career. Blood Meridian, which the critics regard as his opus magnum, is on the high point of this curve, the point where he "overwrites" (but brilliantly: I imply no criticism). His early style certainly reflects Faulknerian southern-gothic influences (Outer Dark so reminds me of Light in August because of Rinthy.) My take is that by Blood Meridian he'd synthesised his two main influences, Faulkner and Joyce, and taken on board a lot of other stuff, such as the bible and Shakespeare. But since Blood Meridian, he's gone back down this curve to a more muted, restrained, reflective style. The Road is clearly a lot closer to the type of writing in Child of God than it is to Blood Meridian. Suttree is clearly the odd book out, it superimposes over the entire ouvre, with its linguistic richness and broad comic elements (like fucking the watermelons). If it's true that he spent twenty years on it, he must have started it before his first published novel- ie in the late fifties. That might explain why it's so "untypical". I can't wait for the novel he's reputed to be working on, The Passenger.

Darryl Price
Dec 03, 05:07pm

I vote Joyce. It's sometimes more beautiful than I can stand, but I can hardly wait to get to the next word, the next sentence, and be thrilled all over again. Pure magic.
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