Palm Sunday

"First, a word on classification. Vonnegut himself wrote, “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labelled ‘science fiction’ … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” He has never quite been taken out, though: it’s hard to avoid if you’re going to write about time travel and aliens. But yes, you’ll find a blend of genres within his books. And here, he turns essayist, and speechwriter, and occasional playwright – it’s a collage of his thoughts over the years in any form, put together thoughtfully with original material. Again, I first read this as a teen, and I had absolutely never read anything like it. I now realise that many of his tenets stuck with me. Love or loathe him, Vonnegut writes with a clarity and force that allows you to love or loathe him – he distils his meaning into such clear, forceful pages that you can reckon with him directly. He has something to say. And that matters to him, as becomes evident from accumulated comments in this volume. In “Self-Interview” he says, “I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” And in the chapter “How to write with style” he warns that style alone is useless: “The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not… Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.” It’s a great book for writers, both for demonstration and explanation of a certain approach. It’s a great book for fans of his work, revealing the experiences behind them, and commentaries such as his own grading system (an A+ for Cat’s Cradle , a D for Slapstick ). And it’s a great book for some bracing, scattergun thoughts on how to live. He thinks “we are all experiments in enthusiasms”; he thinks we are all dogged by the “existential hum” of “embarrassment. I have somehow disgraced myself”; he thinks the best thing to be doing with our lives would be to “create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured”, and lacking religion (a theme he explores at length), we also need urgently to “expound theories about life in which sane human beings… can believe”. It’s direct and opinionated, and even when you don’t like it, it’s galvanizing. And it’s more nuanced than it seems at first, too; taken as a whole, he’s doing something more subtle than any one sentence suggests. He’s getting at the same things good sci fi does, I think. You can feel his deep interest in how society shapes humans, and how society justifies itself in peculiar ways, and how insanely we can all behave. If you want to get back to why we should care about imagining humans in different societies, with different technologies, but still full of all their humanness – read Kurt Vonnegut . And letters, and a funeral address (which made me tear up), and columns… Plus original material he wrote to hold it all together. Not everything’s a winner. It’s a shame the tedious chapter on Genealogy comes up second – skip it – and I didn’t get anything much from his dramatized Jekyll and Hyde. But overall, there’s remarkably little fluff. Only in his parting essays do you suddenly see a real vulnerability, a sadness. He doesn’t preach as someone who feels he’s cracked living himself, by any means. There’s much that’s personal in this, but no overall just-so story of his life to be drawn from it – perhaps following his own writing advice: “All you can do is tell what happened. You will get thrown out of this course if you are arrogant enough to imagine that you can tell me why it happened. You do not know. You cannot know.”"