Just in case anyone is keeping track, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five the other night. It was the first time I’ve ever read it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I liked it. I’m not prepared to say much about it yet — I’m afraid my brain’s literary-analysis lobe has atrophied quite a bit since I finished college and embarked on a steady diet of non-fiction and lowbrow genre crap — but I plan to write more after I ponder it for awhile. In the meantime, however, I recommend this classic American novel for those who, like me, missed reading it in school.
I’ve now moved on to a collection of Vonnegut’s short fiction called Welcome to the Monkey House. As with Slaughterhouse, I’m enjoying it. Some of it, anyway; I find short-story collections are, by their very nature, pretty hit-and-miss, with some stories doing more for me than others. There are enough hits happening, however, that I think I’m becoming a definite admirer of Kurt Vonnegut. But there is one thing about him that I’m not getting. All the cover blurbs on these ’70s-vintage paperbacks of mine rave about how funny he is, and I’m afraid I just don’t see it. Humor is, of course, highly subjective and, I believe, often dependent on historical context — in other words, I’m suggesting that maybe this stuff was knee-slapping in the era of Vietnam and Watergate but no longer carries the same punch. Or maybe it’s just me. Either way, I’m not laughing much at Vonnegut’s writing. I find his words truthful, elegant, frequently powerful, often clever, but not funny. He does have a way with an image, though. Consider this line from his story “Who Am I This Time?”:
…his eyes (were) still on her. Those eyes burned up clothes faster than she could put them on.
Oh, yeah, I like that. It’s got a little noir flavor there, which makes sense in the story’s context, it perfectly converys the man’s expression, and it’s a line that stays with you after you read it. Very nice.
But I still didn’t laugh.
Jason, I look forward to reading further entries on Vonnegut once you’ve digested. I confess that I haven’t read Slaughterhouse Five, but I did love Cat’s Cradle in high school and remember howling with laughter at the mock-religion Bokononism. It was satirical and irreverent, and I loved the deadpan delivery. At 18 it seemed like the world of literature had cracked open, and I was ready for Lolita and The Crying of Lot 49, which I read the following year in college. Since then I’ve read enough postmodern novels to have grown a bit tired of the genre. But it would be interesting to reread Cat’s Cradle and see how it holds up to my cranky 35-year old sensibilities.
In my case, it seems like my 37-year-old crankiness supplies whatever it was I was missing back in high school and college. I’ve revisited a number of works I read then and didn’t think much of, only to find that I now understand and admire them.
I still don’t think I’m ready for hardcore post-modernism, though. 🙂