A Series of Accidents is a chronological read-through of the books of Kurt Vonnegut. You can check out earlier articles in the series here.
When I was a teenager, there was a cottage industry of snarky (some might say smarmy) left-of-centre books mocking the George W. Bush presidency and all that came with it. I bought books from Al Franken, Bill Maher, and Michael Moore, and laughed along through repeated reads. (Somehow Moore has aged the best of these.) I ate these up like a Chinese buffet, along with nightly viewings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and assorted liberal blogs. All of these liberal works felt like a relief from the overwhelming conservatism of mainstream media at the time, and also selfishly allowed my smart-aleck Canadian self to look down at the stupid Americans.
It was at this media moment that I had one of my first introductions to Kurt Vonnegut. He had been a guest on The Daily Show, perhaps to promote this book, although I can’t remember if I specifically saw the episode. I do remember watching the episode that aired the day after he died, two or so years after the release of A Man without A Country. “I am sick of losing people we need,” Stewart said, and he was right. We did need Vonnegut, even in his 80s, someone who could remain the righteous fury that the moment required without ever losing his sense of humour and humanity.
A Man Without A Country is Vonnegut’s version of one of those anti-Bush books, but it’s weird and unfocused in the quintessential Vonnegutian way. Like God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian it’s a very slim volume, closer to a chapbook than a full monograph. He gets his jabs in at the administration he detested, making fun of the indignity of being ruled by a Dick, Bush, and Colon, but these segments were usually codas to the topics that Vonnegut always discussed in his nonfiction. We have a version of the “chalk talk” on story structure, a chapter about Eugene Debs, and so on and so forth.
More than anything, Vonnegut was using his disgust at the war in Iraq to put forth a broader idea of secular humanism. He tries, in his own meandering way, to make the case that we should feel loyalty to humanity as a whole and not a particular nation or group – the old idea of granfalloons. At the same time, Vonnegut doesn’t hold out much hope for humans to actually embrace undifferentiated kindness to their fellow man. He describes humans as “chimpanzees who got crazy drunk on power”, and says his last words will be “life is no way to treat an animal, even a mouse.” The world depicted in A Man Without A Country is one lurching towards endless war and climate catastrophe due to the selfishness and myopia of humans.
Vonnegut says he loves life because he loves music, and he loves making ordinary small talk with people, even as it’s gradually automated out of everyday life. But when it comes to political power, he has no hope for man to overcome its basest instincts. And why wouldn’t he be pessimistic? Vonnegut spent his formative years during the FDR presidency, only to see America gradually lurch to the right through Nixon and Reagan and finally Bush, all while his own life gradually became more constrained due to fame, infirmity, and the looming spectre of death. Recent events have not exactly refuted his cynicism either. One can only imagine what Vonnegut would have written about Trump.
And so Vonnegut ended his career on a very pessimistic notes. The last pages of A Man Without A Country are a poetic requiem about the dying environment, ending in “people did not like it here.” He mentions working on another novel, If God Were Alive Today, but who knows if this was a serious project or a Kilgore Trout-esque joke. In the end, this ended up being the final book Vonnegut published in his lifetime, and while he may not have ended on a home run, it does at least have the feeling of an old man looking back on his life, and perhaps not liking what he saw.
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In the winter of 2007, Vonnegut slipped on a patch of ice on the stairs outside of his New York brownstone home. He hit his head, and was quickly admitted to a hospital, where he would die several weeks later. It was a death that Vonnegut could have made a lot of jokes about, and perhaps did when he was reunited with St. Peter at the pearly gates. After all, he always loved slapstick.
Several books of Vonnegut’s uncollected or unpublished writings have been released after his death, ranging from his last essays to his World War II love letters. I won’t be including them in this project, both because of the authorial haziness of posthumous writing and because this has frankly dragged on long enough. But it’s worth noting how much Vonnegut continued to be a marketable and influential author – perhaps even more so – after his death, with his works continuing to be reprinted and re-read.
Doing this project has significantly changed how I thought about Kurt Vonnegut. Having read primarily his canonical 60s work before and loved it, I was hoping to find at least one work that knocked my socks off the way that Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle did in university, and I’m not sure I found that. But reading all of Vonnegut’s books has perhaps given a better sense of who he was as an author, and as a human being.
Vonnegut was a working writer, who wasn’t afraid to repeat himself or send out a half-baked idea if there was a paycheque in it. And yet, outside of his early short stories, there’s very little of his work that doesn’t feel like it’s essentially his. Whether it was an essay or a science-fiction novel, his unique perspective always shaped the work, and he always seemed to be trying hard to reach some kind of transcendent insight even if it never quite came.
I also found myself enjoying a lot of Vonnegut’s later career works, that haven’t received as much attention. In the novels, at least, Vonnegut was always trying something new, whether it be the more or less realism of Jailbird or the diverse cli-fi of Galapagos. There are certainly recurring themes, tropes, and even characters, but it always feels as if he’s making an earnest attempt to create something that will stack up to his 60s masterpieces. Even in more ephemeral works like God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian there’s formal experimentation. It’s the same wine, but the glass is always new.
Vonnegut once famously gave all his books letter grades, and went back to add more at one point. In general I find that number and letter grades are reductive and boring, but also very necessary in a world where there is more art than time. And if it’s good enough for Kurt, it’s good enough for me. So here’s what I’d give all of the books Vonnegut released in his life time:
Bagombo Snuff Box: C-
Bluebeard: B
Breakfast of Champions: B
Cat’s Cradle: A
Deadeye Dick: C+
Fates Worse Than Death: B-
Galapagos: A-
God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian: B-
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: B
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: C+
Hocus Pocus: B+
Jailbird: B+
A Man Without A Country: C+
Mother Night: A
Palm Sunday: B
Player Piano: C
Slapstick: B
Slaughterhouse-Five: A+
Sirens of Titan: B-
Timequake: B-
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons: C
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-
As was the case when I was a teaching assistant, I’m an easy B and a hard A. In any case, I think these rankings show that while Vonnegut’s work had its ups and downs, and some of the collections could definitely be seen as thrown together, outside of some sloggy early work while he was still finding his voice none of it was all that bad. And, when you publish over 20 books, that’s quite an accomplishment.
In the end, Kurt Vonnegut remains one of the most unique figures in American literature. He breaches the boundaries between literature and science fiction, post-modern experimentation and mass appeal, and between candid confessionalism and clever self-marketing. It’s been a pleasure getting to know him better, and I hope anyone who’s actually been reading these articles have enjoyed the ride.
I’d like to give a shout-out to Charles J. Shields’ biography And So It Goes, which was my main resource on the life of Vonnegut, as well as academic studies by Jerome Klinkowitz and others. Also, a big thank you to Alan Weiss for having us read Cat’s Cradle in his class on apocalyptic science fiction and beginning a fixation. This series took way longer than I thought, but I’d like to do another one in the future, although perhaps something completely different.