Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Timequake (1997)

 

This was his final novel, and I'm calling it a novel regardless of ambiguity on the grounds of its predecessors being novels. It began life as the tale of a timequake, causing time to slip backwards a decade, then start again, obliging everyone to relive the previous ten years one moment at a time without being able to change anything. Unfortunately it just didn't want to be written so the author eventually cannibalised it and made a stew incorporating autobiographical elements. You could call it an autobiography or an extended essay, but novel works just as well. Kilgore Trout from Slaughterhouse Five features heavily, as do many, many short sketches of his stories, regarding which - in case you can't be arsed to skip back to August 2024:

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

It works pretty much as autobiography, even with the fiction embedded, and honestly isn't much different to Slaughterhouse Five, to which it might be deemed a sequel, I suppose.

Vonnegut's recycling of his own incomplete material is inspired, with the timequake itself serving as metaphor to the ageing process and its shifting emphasis on memory - the author being well into his seventies and duly reflective by this point. As a slightly jazzy thesis on memory and the passage of time, the book also serves to illustrate the slow disintegration of culture during the twentieth century, not so much for the sake of shaking a fist at clouds, but a lament at our having lost sight - as we most certainly have - of what makes it fun. Contrary to the publicity, this isn't a bunch of random observations indulgently slung together but a very clear and direct summary of our world interspersed with jokes and asides, specifically because jokes and asides - and even throwaway synopses for science-fiction tales which will never be written - are the details which matter most. It's sad, funny and, as always, thought provoking.

I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't much about James Blocker and his ongoing fight with the Droon from Rigel, but you can't have everything.

Starshine

Theodore Sturgeon Starshine (1966)
This collection of six short stories is possibly the first Sturgeon I've read since having noticed that Kurt Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was based on Sturgeon. Given that Vonnegut tended to write Trout as cranky at best, and otherwise something of a loser, I've found it hard to avoid this notion tainting my impression of Sturgeon's fiction, although in this case, the parallels seem to exist independent of my imagination. However, it should probably be remembered that Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends, and that the genesis of Trout was as much to do with Kurt being amused by the idea of someone having a fish for a surname. I really don't think Kilgore Trout was intended as a criticism of Sturgeon, even though it's difficult to get away from the possibility.

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

While I recall Sturgeon's More Than Human as astonishing, nothing since has done much to sustain that impression. Apparently I thought The Synthetic Man was great too, and yet I don't even remember reading it.

Anyway, the six stories collected as Starshine mostly represent sparky, original ideas, and Sturgeon's prose is jazzy and engaging, or should be engaging, bespeckled as it is with unexpected and often startling images; and yet I kept finding myself thinking that Vonnegut had a point, even though Vonnegut's point was never anything to do with the quality of what his friend wrote. The energetic style isn't really a problem and never quite becomes as irritating or yappy as Kornbluth could occasionally be after a major Sunny D jag, but the ideas at the heart of these tales somehow feel convoluted and unlikely for the sake of convoluted and unlikely, as though Sturgeon wrote to see whether he could pull it off, imposing what might at least seem like internal logic on this stuff; and I found it hard to care. For all that Sturgeon wrote well, I was left without any idea as to why he wrote these.

Amazing Stories (December 1965)

Joseph Ross (editor) Amazing Stories (December 1965)
Well, the conclusion of Murray Leinster's Killer Ship failed to rescue the story, which is a shame; and my frown was sustained during Cordwainer Smith's On the Sand Planet, which doesn't seem to have improved since I read it as part of Quest of the Three Worlds a couple of years ago. As ever, his prose is delightfully ornate whilst failing to amount to anything, and it's not even engaging as a peculiarly incoherent ramble. Your average Burroughs cut-up text honestly communicates more than Cordwainer Smith's aesthetically pretty glossolalia.

Chad Oliver's Final Exam is approximately readable but mainly through being mercifully short, comparing the plight of indigenous Martians to that of Native Americans without any conspicuous excess of cultural sensitivity, and a tweedy professor lights up his pipe on the very first page; and continuing our cautious ascent towards reading pleasure, Robert Sheckley's Restricted Area is kind of stupid but fairly entertaining, amounting to a Star Trek away mission to a planet with an ecosystem designed by Dr. Seuss.

Finally, The Comet Doom by Edmond Hamilton reprints a story first published during the Gernsback years of Amazing as very clearly signposted by the arguably clunkier aspects of the tale; except it remains a great read regardless, presumably meaning Hamilton actually knew his way around a typewriter. It somehow manages to surprise, even to communicate a certain sense of wonder with stuff that otherwise feels vaguely familiar through repetition by numerous other writers - cybernetic invaders with organic brains inside robotic bodies, earth pulled out of its orbit, the one man who knows and who has to stop them, and so on and so forth. I think I'll see if I can't find me some more Hamilton.

Excepting Hamilton, Nowlan, and possibly Robert Sheckley, it seems fair to say that things weren't looking great for Amazing Stories during the second half of 1965 with tales which, for the most part, weren't amazing, and with the absence of anything amazing thrown into uncomfortably sharp relief by both the editorial and letters page. The latter reproduces a number of bewildering testimonials to Amazing as the most amazing of amazing things ever to amaze its amazed readership, whilst the editorial mounts a bitter campaign against the haters and those who might believe Adequate Stories to have been a more appropriate title, only to end up looking like a complete wanker with a diatribe approximating to yeah but no but yeah but no but Kurt Vonnegut thinks he's so lush now 'cos he says he don't write science-fiction and he thinks he's too good for science-fiction these days even though everybody knows he writes science-fiction and he thinks he's all that but he don't know nuffink.

Maybe it's just me.

Welcome to the Monkey House

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Welcome to the Monkey House (1970)
I never really intended to read my way through his entire back catalogue, but I guess he wrote so much, and so much which sold so well as to warrant an extended print run, that I suppose it's inevitable that I should still be finding titles I'm yet to read on the second hand shelves; and I usually buy them because there's always the chance of the latest find being one of the good ones. Usually it is, although sometimes it will turn out to have been Kurt going through the motions, meaning the jokes are still good but the whole gets to be a bit of a slog. Monkey House was purchased out of habit without particularly high expectations. I knew it was a collection of previously published material, and this would therefore be my fourth Vonnegut of such composition. I knew not to anticipate any massive surprises.

Happily, excepting a single book review, it turns out to be a collection of his short fiction, and therefore quite unlike other assemblages I've read which have been mostly of essays and the like. Even better is that it seems Vonnegut was well suited to the short form given how it obliged him to get straight to the point, sparing us any of the rambling post-modern gagfests which are either wonderful, or else serve only to remind me of Marx Brothers routines amounting to someone talking bollocks very, very fast. Most of these short stories were written prior to the success of Slaughterhouse Five,  back when he was still trying and are thus informed with a sense of the author hoping to appeal to an audience at least a little bit. Hence we get the apeshit satire, Jonathan Swift jammed on eleven and daring you to whine about suspension of disbelief, but relayed with a tight, vaguely populist sense of craft - like Player Piano distilled to something which doesn't go on far too long. There are a few which don't really do anything much, but everything here is kept short and punchy so its worth sitting through a few duds for the sake of Harrison Bergeron, More Stately Mansions or The Kid Nobody Could Handle. Vonnegut's strength has always been his humour combined with a razor sharp critique of Emperors failing to dress themselves accordingly, in which capacity Monkey House represents an impressive display of muscle.

A Man Without a Country

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A Man Without a Country (2005)
I've recently been cutting down on social media, mostly so as to diminish my exposure to the opinions of shitheads. Where once I believed there might be some good in communicating with shitheads, engaging in hope of helping them to understand the extent of their own shitheadedness and by extension making the world a better place, or at least a less shitty place to some miniscule degree, these days I'm not so sure; and I'm not convinced of that which shitheads express being anything you could legitimately call opinion. It's usually something some bigger boys said and they thought it sounded cool so now they're saying it too, for example:

We love President Trump in Alabama. Our UN-employment rate is lower than it has been in 50 years. Which proves people will work if the democrats will stop trying to make the USA a socialist country. The democrats have become the new hate group bc they hate democracy.

See? Is there really any point arguing with such a complete fucking tool? Are these the words of a person who seems likely to respond to reason? Do these seem like the words of a person to whom you would entrust the care of an animal or another human being? This isn't even one of the serious shitheads who blames immigration or liberal values or science or black people, just some numbskull with comprehension issues. Should I choose to engage with this individual, it seems likely that he or she would only become more firmly entrenched within his or her shithead convictions, and I would become unhappy for, as Henry Rollins says, when you engage with an asshole, you become the asshole.

To some this doubtless means I'm one of the sneering liberal metropolitan elite, but I really couldn't give a fuck. When a four-year old child I've never met runs up to me in some park and calls me a pooface, I couldn't give a fuck then either, because the wrath of people who barely understand anything is meaningless and carries no value. Shitheads don't deserve a reasoned response. They deserve to be punched hard over and over and over and over in the face with a clenched fist until bones crack and blood begins to gush so that they shut up, stop, or go away, whichever comes first.

I would guess that Vonnegut understood this, although I don't know where he would have stood on the punching thing. I would guess that Vonnegut understood this because it touches on what most of his novels were about, to one degree or another; and this, his last book, written in his eighties and borrowing from material first published in In These Times magazine, boils down everything he said into one easily digestible helping, very high in fibre, and entirely without illusions regarding the shit we've gotten ourselves into. Either read it and understand, or just fuck the fucking fuck off. Those seem to be the options here.

It's also very funny, somehow.

Palm Sunday

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Palm Sunday (1981)
Most of Vonnegut's novels constitute autobiography of one form or another. Palm Sunday goes a little further, being an assemblage of essays, reviews, newspaper articles, speeches, unpublished introductions to other people's books, and notes reminding the milkman that no further yoghurt will be required until the weekend; so it's the same sort of deal as Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, except ordered as a chronology with added material framing most of the reprints in the wider context of Vonnegut's existence.

There are several problems with this as a collection. Firstly the fifty pages of Vonnegut dynastic history covering four generations - or what felt like four generations - written by a distant relative is almost certainly more fun to read if you're actually a Vonnegut. Secondly, despite much of Vonnegut's oeuvre being approximately autobiographical, it's rare that he talks about his career as a writer - excepting parodies by way of Kilgour Trout - and I guess that was a good thing. Here he talks about the art of writing, about the business aspect, and about hanging out with other writers. Some of it's sort of interesting - notably what an arsehole Jack Kerouac obviously was - but somehow this daylight cast upon magic seems counterproductive, suggesting a Vonnegut with more than a touch of the Richard Stilgoe or Ronnie Corbett about him. There's a whole blogging genre out there born from young, slightly clueless university educated men who've decided to pursue careers as authors of Doctor Who novels, having somehow failed to make the distinction between the world of Camus and Genet and exciting telly adventures featuring outer space robot people; and whilst these young lads may well be as harmless and amiable as their work, their online musings are purest grade one ballsache.

Where I get my amazing ideas...

Analysing the genius of Stephen Moffat…

A day in the life of an unpublished author...

Wish me luck! I'm thinking of pitching a story pitting the first Doctor against the Sontarans…

Oh look, yet another charity anthology…

I suppose it's my own fault that I'm even aware of such twattery; but to return to the point, Vonnegut's reportage of certain aspects of his writing career unfortunately convey a similarly sense of indulgence, as though he's just got settled in his favourite armchair, pipe at the ready, and a wry wink as we embark on the first anecdote of many. You don't have to be crazy to write these books, but it helps!

On the other hand, even at his cosiest, Vonnegut mostly remains at least self aware and disinclined to brag.

I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

There's just about sufficient quality material laced through the collection to justify ploughing on through the cosier sections, observations regarding Dresden, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline being of particular note.

Now is as good a time as any to mention White House prayer breakfasts, I guess. I think we all know now that religion of that sort is about as nourishing to the human spirit as potassium cyanide. We have been experimenting with it. Every guinea pig died. We are up to our necks in dead guinea pigs.

Palm Sunday is unmistakeably the work of the guy who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and the rest, with that same scathing wit and ability to cut to the chase; but it's nowhere near so good as the novels, and there's a seam of schmaltz running through it which jars almost as much as its peculiarly Stilgoe-esque cover.

The Star Wasps

Robert Moore Williams The Star Wasps (1963)
I've already spotted a pattern of certain themes running through what I've read by Robert Moore Williams, and Star Wasps ticks most of the boxes. Williams wrote what I've come to think of as theosophic science-fiction - for the sake of argument - and this one feels accordingly allegorical whilst making use of tropes commonly associated with certain types of schizophrenia - notably subterranean realms and ethereal beings visible only to a select few exerting a malign influence on humanity whilst moving among us undetected. The Star Wasps kicks off inside one of those pseudo-Babylonian towers reaching to heaven, in this case the headquarters of an omnipotent corporation which dominates human society in ways which reminded me a lot of the mechanised society in Vonnegut's Player Piano. A player piano significantly features in one scene and I'm inclined to wonder whether it might be an acknowledgement of just such an influence. Anyway, as with other Williams novels, we have the many-tiered tower of Babel, and also its subterranean inversion - although the caverns and tunnels which count for the purposes of this story are on the moon. The intermediary point is a bar incongruously styled as something from the old west and populated by characters who speak like people from movies of the thirties and forties - specifically outlaws, because naturally this is a novel about the resistance.

'I'm not so sure about that,' Mom answered. 'People learn to like their chains. Sometimes they fight you when you try to take their chains away from them.'

Robert Moore Williams was a man with certain psychiatric idiosyncrasies, many of which are revealed in the kind of stories he told, and the ways he tried to tell them. The Star Wasps is undeniably cranky with a distinctly dreamlike quality, actions which don't quite make sense, random narrative swerves, and things which never quite add up; the star wasps, for example - not once referred to by this name which appears nowhere in the text - are never fully explained, and never convincingly tied into whatever is going on.

On the other hand, Williams writes well enough to fool us into feeling as though we're getting a coherent story, and he makes up for continuity glitches with an atmosphere which remains arrestingly weird for the duration.

There were thousands of tunnels here, she had to be careful to pick the right turn. Vague memories of pictures illustrating Dante's Inferno in an old book flashed through her mind. Some of the people in the depths of hell the poet had visioned had been doomed to flee forever through dark and twisting tunnels like these caves under the moon's surface. There was something nightmarish about this situation. She felt like she was having a bad dream in which she was doomed to flee forever from something. There was also in this situation something of that terror that sometimes comes into the minds of young girls when they dream of snakes.

Never having been a young girl, I'm not sure I can really say anything useful about that last one.

This is the fifth I've read by this guy, and the fifth which, despite being about as nutty as they come, hasn't let me down. Whatever the hell Robert Moore Williams may have been about, I'd say he was potentially anything but just another forgotten pulp author hacking out tales of rocket ships and space monsters. His ambition clearly outstripped his ability in certain respects, but he was at least able to communicate something.

Dead-Eye Dick

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Dead-Eye Dick (1982)
I'm beginning to get the feeling that Vonnegut more or less wrote the same book over and over, and by terms more pronounced than with any other author I can think of off the top of my head. It may be only a pattern arisen from the repetition of his very distinctive style, but I don't think so, and in any case, it's not necessarily an objection. If true, I suppose that would mean that the difference between his better and his lesser novels depends on whether or not they count as a good telling of the same story, whether he hit the right notes, and so on.

Dead-Eye Dick probably isn't anything amazing, but it helps that the organised chaos of Vonnegut's narrative never sprawls too far from the main point, at least not without a good reason; so it doesn't irritate like a few of those I've wanted to slap and demand what the fuck are you going on about now? This should probably be considered an achievement given that this narrative occasionally takes the form of scripts for a stage play imagined by Rudy Waltz, our main character, and even recipes; and of course, Rudy's dad was best friends with Adolf Hitler at one point, so it's not like Vonnegut was particularly reigning it in for this one.

As with other versions of the same story, Dead-Eye Dick is about life kicking you in the ass, over and over, things which happen for no good reason, and which break your heart.

She said that there would be a wonderful new world when the war was won. Everybody who needed food or medicine would get it, and people could say anything they wanted, and could choose any religion that appealed to them. Leaders wouldn't dare to be unjust anymore, since all the other countries would gang up on them. For this reason, there could never be another Hitler. He would be squashed like a bug before he got very far.

See what I mean? I should probably just leave it there, because that's what this book is about. It's not his best, but it does it's job very well.

Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1979)
Taken as a body of work, Kurt Vonnegut's writing can be frustrating in so much as that whilst its value is always quite clearly discernible, often it is defeated by the narrative chaos in which his pearls of genuine wisdom are bedded; and yet the narrative chaos may be integral to the communication of the aforementioned pearls of genuine wisdom. So, to put it simply, it's a balancing act of just enough randomly surrealist swerves to keep it interesting without getting boring and losing the reader. When he's on form, he's amazing, but when the balance is off, his books can be a real chore.

Excepting Fortitude, a screenplay for a short film, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons is non-fiction - the essays, reviews, articles, and public oratory of Kurt Vonnegut, plus one lengthy interview which first appeared in Playboy. Of course, with Vonnegut, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction refers to the least important aspects of the narrative; and - happily - the discipline of this shorter form brings his thoughts into much sharper focus. There's still the sense of him running into a sweet shop and simultaneously grabbing at everything within reach, all at the same time, but the points made are bolder, more direct, particularly as an admission of the pessimism which informs his writing.

I saved my marriage many times by exclaiming, 'Wait! Wait! I see light at the end of the tunnel at last!' And I wish I could bring light to your tunnels today. My wife begged me to bring you light, but there is no light. Everything is going to become unimaginably worse, and never get better again. If I lied to you about that, you would sense that I'd lied to you, and that would be another cause for gloom. We have enough causes for gloom.

He even applies the same ruthless honesty to his own tendency to frame everything as satire, albeit dark satire.

I had the feeling [Abbie Hoffman] wasn't going to be clowning much more. A lot of naturally funny people who want to help Losers aren't going to clown anymore. They have caught on that clowning doesn't throw off the timing or slow down cruel social machinery. In fact, it usually serves as a lubricant.

Every so often somebody tells me that it is a delicious fact of history that clowns have often been the most effective revolutionaries. That isn't true. Cruel social machines in the past have needed clowns for lubrication so much that they have often manufactured them. Consider the Spanish Inquisition.

When the Inquisition was about to burn somebody alive in a public square, it shaved that person from head to foot. It tortured the person to the point of babbling idiocy, fitted him out with a dunce cap and a lurid paper cloak. His or her face was painted or masked.

Hey presto! A clown!

The idea, of course, was to make the victim comical rather than pitiful. Pity is like rust to a cruel social machine.

This all adds up to a collection which carefully explains everything that is wrong with western civilisation, even the human race itself, and explains it in clear and concise terms which even a fucking idiot would understand, and in generous, good humoured spirit without either sneering or pointing fingers - which Vonnegut identifies as at least part of the broader problem.

Seeing as everything is only going to get worse anyway, one more finger isn't going to make much difference. If you happen to be, for example - a 2018 Congressional candidate still campaigning on the basis of something Obama may or may not have done, a dangerous orange draft dodger who shouldn't be left in charge of a pot plant let alone an entire country, or just my wife's dumbass facebook friend posting about how much she resents her taxes paying for welfare recipients to eat lobster - then you really, really, really, really need to read this book, because it will explain where you're going wrong and why you're making everything worse for the rest of us; except of course you won't because you're scared, and Vonnegut also explains that too.

Jailbird

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Jailbird (1979)
Never trust a true return to form. This was his best novel since Slaughterhouse Five according to a couple of the reviews quoted in the opening pages, presumably in the same way of Bowie's Black Tie White Noise having been a true return to form by virtue of having been marginally less shit than its predecessor.

When Vonnegut fails, it's usually been because he buries whatever the fuck the book was trying to do under a spaghetti mound of absurdist interconnected asides which begin to irritate once you realise that you've forgotten what was supposed to be happening beneath all of those tangents. When he succeeds, that's when the tangents work, and when it feels like there's some point to our having vanished down yet another rabbit hole. Whilst Jailbird doesn't quite belong to the first group, it's unusually sober for Vonnegut, lacking much of his characteristic humour, and thus similarly becomes a bit of a slog, albeit for different reasons.

It's a shame because I'm more than on board for what Jailbird wants to do, but actually reading and digesting the thing makes it difficult. It's the fictitious but plausible account of a well-intentioned stooge caught up in Watergate and subsequently incarcerated, and all loosely spun around a fictional historical massacre of unionised workers in exploring just why America regards compassion as a sign of either weakness or communism.

If this were done as a modern Passion Play, the actors playing the authorities, the Pontius Pilates, would still have to express scorn for the opinions of the mob. But they would be in favour rather than against the death penalty this time.

And they would never wash their hands.

The point is well made, and of course it's a point which particularly needs making at the moment, but there's a lot of other stuff to wade through. Jailbird is better than the barely readable ones, but feels a little too joyless for its own good.

The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction

Robert P. Mills (editor)

The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction eleventh series (1962)
Rightly or wrongly, I've always had the impression of Fantasy & Science Fiction as the American analogy to New Worlds, roughly speaking, at least in relation to Analog, Amazing, Galaxy, and the other magazines. Whilst you could usually expect a short story involving rockets and another involving alien civilisations from most of them, Fantasy & Science Fiction seemed to be the one to publish the weird stuff which didn't really fit anywhere else. That being said, I expected to enjoy this collection more than I did.

In its favour there are characteristically wonderful contributions from Clifford D. Simak and Poul Anderson, while Cordwainer Smith and Avram Davidson have both written impressively peculiar tales of quality sufficient as to suggest that I really need to hunt down a few more by those two. Then there's an underwhelming early work by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., something by Isaac Asimov which is probably about as whelming as I expected it to be, and my first encounter with Gordon R. Dickson which at least suggests that I've been wise to steer clear of anything with his name on the cover. George by John Anthony West is okay, and then there are another five tales listed in the index which I know I read but about which I can't remember a single thing; plus there's a couple of poems which weren't really my sort of thing.

Still, I suppose this kind of deal will always be very much like a box of chocolates in so much as that you never know which one you're gon' git, excepting cases of it being one of those boxes of chocolates wherein the various flavours featured amongst the selection are quite clearly denoted on the inside of the lid. They can't all be amazing, I guess, but it's nice that some of them are. Maybe they were just having an off year.

Slapstick

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Slapstick (1976)
I reached saturation point with Vonnegut a few books ago, and with three or four still to be read due to my having stumbled across cheap copies back before he'd begun to get on my tits. Happily, my disillusionment turns out to have been a mirage formed by the chance reading of a couple of his more disappointing works in a row; which I realise now because, against expectation, Slapstick is fucking great and has reminded me of everything I liked about the guy in the first place. Naturally it does all the things you would expect of a Vonnegut novel, but does them at least as well as did Slaughterhouse Five, making it easier to forgive Galápagos and others which seemed to get lost in their own labyrinthine jokes to no immediately obvious end.

Slapstick keeps it simple, at least telling its story in a straight line, despite the narrative voice being that of the president of the United States inhabiting some sort of post-catastrophe world with a substantially reduced population, and specifically inhabiting the Empire State building. He's also two metres tall with Neanderthal features, six fingers to a hand, four nipples, and is brother to an identical female twin with whom he once shared a telepathic partnership. They were assumed to be retarded at birth and thus left to their own devices in an abandoned family mansion. Tended only by servants who dressed and fed them, the twins effectively raised themselves. Our man learned to read and was fluent in five or six languages by the age of four, whilst his illiterate sister was gifted with imagination and the ability to wring rich philosophical sense from their shared thoughts, and in doing so to solve all of the problems of the world; and sensing they would be regarded as freakish, the siblings kept their intelligence to themselves, putting on a drooling and gibbering act for the benefit of staff, and during rare, vaguely dutiful visits from parents.

I couldn't actually tell what any of it was about, at least not beyond it being a satire upon the usual institutions and conventions found in Vonnegut's line of fire; but the author introduces the book like so:

This is the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography. I have called it Slapstick because it is grotesque, situational poetry—like the slapstick film comedies, especially those of Laurel and Hardy, of long ago.

It is about what life feels like to me.

Which is probably as much as you need to know for any of it to work; and work it does, regardless of how lurid the caricature becomes, maintaining the well-intentioned but ultimately doomed dignity of Stan and Ollie right up to the last page.

Sombrero Fallout

Richard Brautigan Sombrero Fallout (1976)
I read and enjoyed The Hawkline Monster about thirty years ago, and yet somehow never quite got around to that second Brautigan novel, not even out of curiosity when Pump recorded their Sombrero Fallout album and named it after this - Pump being the vessel in which Andrew Cox had set forth across the musical landscape, and Andrew Cox being my buddy who departed for that great off licence in the sky back in 2009. This copy of Sombrero Fallout turned up in a second hand book store, and in doing so drew to my attention how rarely it is that his books seem to turn up in second hand book stores; which, I suppose, is at least part of the reason. I couldn't just walk away from it, although truthfully, there was something which put me off. I've known a few Caucasian males with a thing for Japanese or otherwise Asiatic women, and whilst I can think of one dude who isn't a weirdo - at least not for that reason - I've often found myself deeply suspicious of this attraction which, in some cases, seems based almost entirely on the exotic credentials of the gals in question. That they're small, supposedly inscrutable, childlike, and passive seem to be the considerations at the core of their appeal amongst a certain type of male; and for what it's worth, I always thought Shonen Knife were shit as well.

Anyway, I felt like Sombrero Fallout might pander to this tendency, at least based on the cover, and happily I was very wrong. Yukiko, the ethnically Japanese woman who walks out on her slightly neurotic Caucasian lover constitutes subject rather than object within the narrative, and is exotic only in the thoughts of her spurned partner.

As the novel opens, our man tears something he's written from the typewriter and tosses it into the waste paper basket. The reject is a tale of what happens when a sombrero falls from a clear sky to land in the street of a small town, and the story expands under its own steam within the confines of the waste paper basket. The sombrero is seen by the mayor and two others, an argument ensues, which quickly expands by chain reaction into a full scale riot complete with a body count. Meanwhile the guy who decided not to write the story spends an hour failing to come to terms with his rejection by Yukiko, and so reveals why she probably made the right choice.

Brautigan has an extraordinary focus on the details of the story almost to the point of it being nothing but detail, as though his business is with the atomic structure of the narrative. This focus presents something which appears deceptively simple and feels somehow nourishing, like it's good for you in the same way as an avocado. In some respects it reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, but more sleek and efficient, with everything right where it needs to be and not a tangent in sight. Brautigan also seems to share Vonnegut's concerns about the future of the planet and the stupid shit humanity gets caught up in from time to time.

Sombrero Fallout is vaguely an allegory of the convoluted relationship between Japan and America, or at least about aspects of the same; but it's an allegory in the sense of certain Surrealist paintings being allegorical, just as Magritte wasn't necessarily painting men in bowler hats. Here we have the sombrero as  mushroom cloud, and the dissolution which comes in its wake, which turns out to be more or less all that is needed to tell the story. Sombrero Fallout therefore feels very much like a complete thing in itself, self-contained and close enough to being a perfect novel as makes no difference.

Player Piano

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Player Piano (1952)
Having been blown away by Slaughterhouse Five all those years ago, I somehow picked up the idea of Player Piano having been Vonnegut's other masterpiece, presumably somehow reading this into the arguably lesser distinction of it simply having been his debut novel.

Player Piano seems to aspire to inclusion in the canon of dystopian classics beginning with Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and continuing through Brave New World and 1984. Themes of men and women trying to get by within a carnivorous and capitalist society, and to which Vonnegut would return over and over, are here expressed as a future America in which mechanisation has divided society into a near useless consumer underclass and the Engineers who tend to the machines. Existence has become a routine, predictable and ultimately soulless process much like the notes plucked out on a player piano. Our main protagonist, the guy who notices how everything is actually a bit shit, is one Paul Proteus, essentially an inversion of the Gernsbackian science hero, for this is very much a novel with one foot in Hugo's tradition whether it likes it or not.

The main problem seems to be that history has outstripped Vonnegut's predictions by coming up with something arguably worse than his vaguely Gernsbackian technological society. At one point our lads pit themselves against a somewhat basic sounding games computer called Charley Checkers, and I found it quite hard to keep from thinking of Mitchell and Webb's Cheesoid; which is ironically fitting because Vonnegut's point is that the mechanisation of society has so often been seen as an end in itself, regardless of either consequences or whether the technology is actually doing anything which is worth doing, which unfortunately leaves the novel resting upon a point which isn't particularly well made.

Stranger still, at least to me, is that Player Piano is very much a linear tale with a beginning, middle, and end, in stark contrast to the rest of what Vonnegut went on to write; and whilst the humour is there, it seems hesitant. You can really tell this is a first novel. It's not without flashes of brilliance here and there, and Vonnegut's political testimony is devastating where it fully comes into focus, but I'm afraid I was just kind of bored for most of the book.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá The Umbrella Academy: Dallas (2009)
I was interviewed for a podcast called Raconteur Roundtable. They were mostly interested in my Faction Paradox novel, Against Nature. The interview was conducted over Skype, and it was fun but exhausting. My original intention had been to present the brooding, unflappable façade of a sort of English Henry Rollins but without the weightlifting, but I suspect I came across more like Suzanne from Orange is the New Black. I kept catching myself in the webcam feed, going cross-eyed and whirling my hand in the air whilst feebly scrabbling to make the word stuff come out good.

That night, I was woken at three in the morning by the cellphone I never use - except to receive sales calls which aren't even for me - beeping to let me know that it needed recharging so that I may receive more calls from people trying to sell car insurance to my mother-in-law. I then found myself unable to get back to sleep until about 6.50AM, having lain awake for several hours giving full consideration to just how mad I sounded during the interview, and whether it would be practical to trace the invention of the beep which a phone makes when it's low on juice at three in the fucking morning back to a single individual and to smash their kneecaps with a hammer. I got up at seven to feed the cats, then went straight back to bed for yer actual sleep and a couple of hours of weird, unpleasant dreams in which Adrian Meredith, my junior school bully, coerced me into buying his girlfriend's gold necklace back from the pawn shop to which he had flogged it.

I woke at ten to discover that Jello the cat had shredded an entire bog roll for the third day running, and so I was not in the sunniest of moods, in contrast to the rest of Texas which was already 98° in the shade. I needed coffee, toast, and the routine of my daily hour or so of reading, but I couldn't face Vonnegut's dreary debut novel. I needed comfort food, so to speak, something colourful and fun requiring no expenditure of brain cells, and so I picked this.

The more I read by Gerard Way, the more I appreciate that he's very much doing his own thing. Obviously there are traces of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, but Umbrella Academy somehow manages to be even more esoteric without ever quite descending into non-sequiteurs. The story ducks and weaves like Nic Roeg, Bill Burroughs, or any reference to weird European cinema you care to make, whilst also doing something suspiciously reminiscent of a garish Saturday morning cartoon serial; and where with Morrison, you can occasionally spot the gaps and sense how pleased with himself he gets over certain layered references, Way has none of that awkward self-consciousness, just confidence and expertise. The story is fucking peculiar, and the art is gorgeous. I've no idea what any of it's about, but it made my day much, much better than it had been.

Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Back in my days of being what has come to be described as a Marvel zombie, fiftieth issues of any given comic were usually celebrated with an expanded page count and a load of unexpected monkeying around with established characters - someone back from the dead, someone quits the team to concentrate on his ice hockey, Irony Girl marries the Sarcasmatron, and so on. Here, approaching his fiftieth birthday, Kurt Vonnegut sort of did the same thing, reviving Kilgore Trout, the pulp science-fiction author from Slaughterhouse Five, Eliot Rosewater from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and others, expressly in the name of clearing his head of all the junk, as he puts it.

I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly—to insult the Star Spangled Banner, to scrawl pictures of a Nazi flag and an asshole and a lot of other things with a felt-tipped pen. To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole:

Accordingly the novel is illustrated with felt-tipped pen scribbles, and Vonnegut introduces himself into the narrative, interacting with Trout and the others and explaining why he created them. So it's kind of a mess, but then that's probably what you expect with Vonnegut, and it is at least an educational and entertaining mess offered in summary of how the world actually works:

The man who told me how to diagram a segment of a molecule of plastic was Professor Walter H. Stockmayer of Dartmouth College. He is a distinguished physical chemist, and an amusing and useful friend of mine. I did not make him up. I would like to be professor Walter H. Stockmayer. He is a brilliant pianist. He skis like a dream.

And when he sketched a plausible molecule, he indicated points where it would go on and on just as I have indicated them—with an abbreviation which means sameness without end.

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:

In other words, everything is connected by one means or another, which is why Vonnegut writes how he writes with all of the digressions and synchronicity, making connections and points which might not otherwise be obvious.

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on.

Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

But is it any good, one might reasonably ask. It's very funny and very readable, but it somehow lacks the craft of Slaughterhouse Five - which is made apparent by how similar the two novels are in certain respects. This one differs with Vonnegut breaking the fourth wall, entering his own novel to spell out why he wrote it. It feels too easy. Back when I was at school, we had an English assignment which meant writing a book over the space of a term, or something which could reasonably be called a book. I waited until the night before we were due to hand something in then cobbled together some twenty or so pages with paper, felt-tipped pens and selotape on the subject of how my book was kind of shit and probably looked as though it had been scrabbled together at last minute; which is kind of what Breakfast of Champions reminds me of. It's good, but it just isn't as satisfying as it should have been.

Hocus Pocus

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Hocus Pocus (1990)
Back in May I read God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by the same author and was inspired to opine:

I've just noticed how my favourite Vonnegut is the first one I read and I've enjoyed each successive title a little less than its predecessor, which seems unfortunate and is probably more to do with my noticing a pattern than whatever qualities the books may have.

The pattern in question is a rambling quality, a tendency to digress at the expense of a coherent, or at least linear, narrative, even when the digressions inevitably feed back into said narrative. Hocus Pocus does the same thing, and although the promise of a return to Slaughterhouse Five greatness made on the cover might be stretching a point, it certainly makes a better go of it than the last few I've read. It's not quite like Vonnegut ever reads as though he's sat at the typewriter tittering to himself, but it helps when the book feels as though it's going somewhere, as this does for most of its page count.

Hocus Pocus purports to be an autobiography written in a prison library on disparate scraps of paper - bus timetables, cigarette cartons, ticket stubs and whatever else was at hand. It's the autobiography of a Vietnam veteran who teaches at a university, or a prison, or at a university occupied following a prison break out - I couldn't quite work out which, so maybe the point is that it's all the same thing. The title refers to the verbal agreements to which we all adhere in order that human society may continue as it does, but which are more or less so much horseshit when you look closely.

He hadn't killed nearly as many people as I had. But then again, he hadn't had my advantage, which was the full cooperation of our government.

It doesn't say anything Vonnegut hasn't already said by this point, but the digressions work better and with more purpose than in the previous few I've read, so it's both funny and satisfying; and it says something which really needs to be said, and says it clearly and without ambiguity.

It says that we, as a race, need to stop being dicks to each other, and we need to stop fucking up the planet. Of course, many others have expressed the same sentiment, and continue to do so. Often their arguments are countered by the forces of dickery by means of linguistic hocus pocus. You've probably seen the sort of thing on social media - the notion that we might want to stop bombing kids or pouring nuclear waste into the lakes of a national park countered by the suggestion that there are two sides to every story and we have to consider the grass roots employees of the munitions or nuclear industry and what they will do if we take away their jobs - in other words, evil fuckers talking shit so as to get their own way without having to grow up and face consequences. Hocus Pocus is about that. It presents its argument in terms which simply can't be disputed by the Adolf Hitler loved his kids crowd.

The orgy of butchery followed a virtually unopposed attack by the Japanese Army on the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, long before this country became part of the Final Rack. Hiroshi Matsumoto had just been born. Prisoners were tied to stakes and used for bayonet practice. Several people in a pit were buried alive. You could see their expressions as the dirt hit their faces.

Their faces disappeared, but the dirt on top kept moving as though there were some sort of burrowing animal, a woodchuck maybe, making a home below.

See, this is the sort of horrifying shit which has actually happened in the world beyond the book, and which is still happening, and which needs to stop right now; and we need to stop kidding ourselves that it makes the slightest bit of difference which flag or ideology is flapping in the breeze behind the man holding the spade.

I don't even know why it should still need stating in the year 2016, but for what it may be worth, Hocus Pocus nevertheless states it very well.

Martians, Go Home

Fredric Brown Martians, Go Home (1955)
I'm not sure quite what I expected with this one based on the somewhat iconic Frank Kelly Freas cover and title, but whatever I expected, the novel has surpassed by a large margin. The Martians have landed, and it looks as though they're planning to stick around; but rather than the traditionally warlike, martial, inhuman, or otherwise hostile invaders from the red planet, this lot are best described as a massive pain in the arse. No wall, locked door or other barrier can keep out these literally little green men, and no-one knows quite why they're here, only that their snide observations and continuous mockery are most unwelcome; and they address everyone as either Mack or Toots depending on whether you're a guy or a broad.

Martians, Go Home is a weird novel but a very funny one, a satire - albeit a satire without any one specific target, excepting possibly the science-fiction novel itself. Thankfully it's entirely free of alien visitors as metaphor for Communist hordes, or any of the other stuff which preoccupied the less-imaginative writers of the fifties. These Martians with their toxic opinions so freely and widely shared might represent something like the self-doubt of the collective unconscious, and perhaps Brown was therefore taking a pot-shot at our propensity for believing any old shit; but I may be over-thinking this angle, and it could simply be Brown taking a pot-shot at the propensity of science-fiction authors to write any old shit - particularly given that the main character is himself an author of science-fiction.

There's probably no way of going into further detail without giving away the ending, although if I've hinted at a certain recursive quality wherein characters understand themselves as interred within novels - well, it's not quite like that, although you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Martians, Go Home isn't some lost post-modern classic, and may even be designed to leave you feeling slightly foolish for entertaining such a notion; but it's thought-provoking, very funny, and reads roughly like Kurt Vonnegut as played by a James Cagney wiseguy; which is good.

Catch-22

Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about failing to connect with yet another supposed classic of twentieth century literature given that a significant quota of the reviews I've found posted online seem to express a general sense of bewilderment, and actually I liked it more than most of the people who actively hated it, so I suppose there's that.

It's beautifully written, but extraordinarily repetitive. There's a point to the repetition but acknowledgement of the fact doesn't really help. Unless you've been living in the proverbial cave since 1961, you will almost certainly be aware that Catch-22 is about absurdity and contradiction, or rather it dissects the second world war in terms of these qualities. The catch of the title is the idea that Yossarian - around whom the novel revolves - aspires to get out of flying yet another bombing mission on grounds of insanity, an aspiration which unfortunately proves him to be entirely sane; and almost every page is crammed with actions rendered meaningless by this sort of circular logic, and there are nearly five-hundred pages. Harold Pinter employed similar devices, but usually required only an hour or so of our time to make his point. Kafka also managed it with greater brevity. My guess would be that Heller was simply hammering the point home, striving for a sort of scale vaguely analogous to a Rothko painting wherein no part of the canvas draws greater focus than any other; or if you prefer, the book is kind of boring, but maybe it's supposed to be boring, like Tony Conrad drawing a single note from his violin over the course of an hour because, as Eno puts it, repetition is a form of change. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies, but I'm guessing the point is boredom plus absurdity times scale in contrast to the horror of the details, the bombing, the severed limbs flying all around, even the rape, all reduced to the absurdist wallpaper of conversations about shoes; for, as Kurt Vonnegut also discovered, war eludes description because the actual experience cannot be replicated, so it's easier to describe its psychological habitat.

Unfortunately though, the uniformity of absurdist surface texture serving to level everything out to actions of equivalent consequence makes it difficult for the reader, or this reader, to really care about any of it, or about who is even who. Such is the quality of writing, not least the jokes, that it's easy enough to keep on going, and is even a pleasure for the most part, so while I didn't feel inclined to pack it in at any point, I frequently found myself thinking that Spike Milligan's war diaries did pretty much the same thing but were funnier and more engaging, and so made the same points better.

I don't know if Catch-22 is quite a classic, although I guess it must be simply because we've all already agreed that it is - which is possibly ironic given that this is more or less what the book is about, namely a world which behaves in such a way entirely because we've agreed that it is so. I'd dispute its being anything like the roller-coaster described by the cover blurb of this edition. My best guess is that its popularity is in part mainly just numbers, and that it first saw print just as a great many Americans really began to ask themselves what the fuck just happened?; and in that context it's probably a better response than the gung-ho or else purely statistical alternatives.

On the other hand, Slaughterhouse Five is half the length, considerably more confusing, and yet clearly a fucking masterpiece, so maybe the previous three paragraphs really aren't much more than word salad and excuses.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1985)
I've just noticed how my favourite Vonnegut is the first one I read and I've enjoyed each successive title a little less than its predecessor, which seems unfortunate and is probably more to do with my noticing a pattern than whatever qualities the books may have. The pattern I've noticed is how we're introduced to a character - let's call him Gary for the sake of argument - and then we have a few pages of Gary pottering about in the tool shed; he picks up a spanner which was given to him by his father, so we have a few pages about Gary's father, famed inventor of something we'll call the Splunge, then we see Gary's father getting into a Splunge-related argument with Doris at the patent office, then how Doris always wanted to write poetry but was dissuaded from doing so by her dentist, then cut to the guy who would be well and truly screwed if there was a Splunge in every home...

Vonnegut always seems to meander in this way - at least based on those I've read - and whilst it can be entertaining in isolation, it's begun to irritate me after six or seven novels. It may allow for some pleasantly amusing digressions but can distract one from getting to grips with the point of the book. I actually read the first sixty pages of this and then started again, having realised I was lost and with no idea of who these people were supposed to be. As formulas go, it's nothing like so irritating as Douglas Adams, but it gets in the way a bit. Vonnegut being Vonnegut, the material strung along this meandering train of thought is generally wonderful, but keeping track of it can be a pain in the arse. His stories rely on cause and effect more than those foggy narratives from which an impression is all you really need - as with William Burroughs - so when the story is obscured by its own telling, there's a problem.

This is a shame because God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is otherwise a great book, so far as I can see. The Mr. Rosewater of the title is one of America's richest men but is painfully aware of his privilege, and takes greater pleasure from work as a volunteer fire fighter. This distinguishes him as clinically insane in the eyes of those for whom wealth is an end in itself, specifically those with a vested interest in Mr. Rosewater behaving according to his fortune. This has quite some resonance for me as relative by marriage to a Texas oil tycoon who himself prefers the company of hillbillies and was once a volunteer fireman.

What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what else I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. 'Thank you very much,' I said. That was exactly what she was waiting for. 'You're entirely welcome,' she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.

I read that passage out loud to my wife and she immediately knew who I'd been reminded of. Anyway, the novel is a fairly straightforward argument against the dehumanising influence of excessive wonga.

'No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people shouldn't have to apologise for being poor. The question in America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? Does he pull his own weight?' '

It's a good argument and it's well stated in entertaining terms, with some pleasantly ludicrous asides to the work of the Vonnegut's fictitious science-fiction author, Kilgore Trout; but at the risk of sounding ungrateful, I just think the whole thing could have been tighter.