Oprah and the Classics

Watch out!  Vonnegut is definitely habit-forming!
-From a Dell Books Advertisement for Welcome to The Monkey House, 1974

On a recent morning, I boarded a New York subway car, glancing at the riders as I settled into a seat.  A homeless man slept in a corner; three skate rats hovered above him, snickering greasily.  A few others read tabloids with Manhattan disinterest; an Orthodox wife corralled her squirming kids.  Despite the varied scene, I was most interested in the man sitting across from me.  He was roughly my age, and was intently reading a book.  I looked away—then, with blasé nosiness, went back for the title: Bluebeard, by Kurt Vonnegut.  The man was absorbed, no doubt reading it for the first time.  I turned away again, mild jealousy creeping in.  I wish I could do that, I thought.

I wished this not because Bluebeard is a great book—though it’s close, one of Vonnegut’s best late novels—but because it was a Vonnegut.  It’s been years since I’ve read him, and in the weeks since that train ride, I’ve come to see how much his work once meant to me, and how much I miss it now.

I discovered Vonnegut, unoriginally enough, in college.  In a small used bookstore, long since vanished, a row of hardcovers caught my eye.  I knelt and came up with Breakfast of Champions.  The title was written in tiny aqua type; underneath, much larger, was the author’s name, in an appealing Cooper font.  The name “Kurt Vonnegut” was both familiar and intrinsically appealing: spiky, ugly, and elegant.  As I flipped through, I found crude pen drawings—tombstones, cows, an asshole.  In between were passages like this:

Sparky could not wag his tail—because of an automobile accident many years ago, so he had no way of telling other dogs how friendly he was.  He had to fight all the time.  His ears were in tatters.  He was lumpy with scars.

And this:

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.

And this:

A dinosaur was a reptile as big as a choo-choo train.

It seemed sad and strange and new.  I was in.  I gave five dollars to the smiling elderly clerk, walked it home, and, splayed in my beer-stained beanbag chair, flew clean through it.  As it turned out, I’d been right: Breakfast of Champions was crushingly sad, thoroughly strange, and unlike anything I’d read.  It was anguished by our mindlessness, but laced with knowing glee.  Despite its outraged pessimism, it was quite a lot of fun.  I needed more.

I returned to the bookstore and made its Vonneguts mine.  A different second-hand shop kept their KVs behind the counter, as liquor stores do with their best stuff.  The books back there were more expensive, but I didn’t care.  Could I have those?  I asked.  Yes, please.  All of them.

Though I read other authors in the months that followed, Vonnegut was the magnetic core of my reading world.  I jumped from the brilliant (Cat’s Cradle) to the good (Player Piano) to the blah (Jailbird) to the brilliant (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater).  I was troubled by Mother Night, addled by Slaughterhouse-Five.  On a visit home, I found Hocus Pocus on my father’s shelf, and promptly stole it away.  Even at their leanest, Vonnegut’s stories worked by wheeling massive concerns—annihilation, fate, the return of Jesus Christ—through bloated cartoon worlds.  He hit the pleasure centers with sickening ease; the junk was strong.  I read his short stories and essays, interviews and speeches; I painted an elaborate gouache portrait of him.  I befriended a collector of “Vonnegut ephemera” who claimed to have been a character in Slapstick.  I pushed the books on others, then fretted for their return.  I read The Eden Express, his son’s psychosis memoir.  And then, within a year or so of finding Breakfast of Champions, I was done.  It had been like bingeing on mangoes.

In this way, Vonnegut’s virtuosity was its own detriment: having fallen so hard for his humor-glazed rage, I had no choice but to rip through everything.  There are plenty of other authors who I’ve liked just as much—T.C. Boyle, say, or Michael Chabon—but with them, I’ve never felt the completist urge.  Riven Rock, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and the rest have been set aside for the future.  But Vonnegut disallowed such patience.  Once I began, the existence of more fed a steady, low-grade mania.

It’s a testament to his skill that in the years since, I’ve never become embarrassed by that mania.  There’s a tendency to disown one’s teenage enthusiasms, to feel that our supposed refinement has made us somehow wiser.  To be sure, I’d rather sand off my nose than read Skinny Legs and All to the strains of Jethro Tull.  But Vonnegut, though best-loved in the days of beanbag chairs and Escher prints, is different.  Unlike Pirsig or Meddle or Jäger, he transcends the collegiate—too sternly pissed to be relegated to a rash and eager past.

So I’ve resolved to reread the man.  I’ve taken my favorite Vonnegut novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, down from the shelf.  To my surprise, having it so near has made me anxious, as if an ex-girlfriend has returned.  Its tattered front cover is taped to the spine; its pages are flaky and tan.  The back cover says that “Only recently has the general public become aware of his unique genius.”  It’s old and frail, but its words remain pungent, tragic, insane:

“And then they tied me to a stake, burned me alive, and dumped my ashes into the nearest stream.  As I say, I haven’t been back since.”