Tim's Reviews > Slapstick, or Lonesome No More

I never put Kurt Vonnegut on my list of favorite authors… and shame on me for that as I’ve at the very least liked everything I’ve read by the man. One of the things I always love about his work is that he was quite possibly the most hopeful cynic in existence. Pessimism is borderline overwhelming in his work, but it always seemed like deep down he still liked people and hoped we would do better, even while being positive that we were doomed by our own failures.

Well, not so here. This book is Slapstick, and like the slapstick comedies of old, there is only failure here. Some people may be good, and some may improve along the way, but there is no hope here. This is easily the bleakest novel I’ve read by Vonnegut (view spoiler)[and that’s saying something considering he literally ended the world in one of his novels. (hide spoiler)]

The plot follows Dr Wilbur Daffodil-II Swain, current (and last) president of the United States of America, King of Manhattan and owner of 1,000+ candlesticks, as he documents his life story and how the world declined. It’s a tale of genius twins, mad schemes, name changes, orgies, revenge, drugs, dystopia and utopia. It’s a tale where everything can go right, even while everything goes to hell. It’s about life, the afterlife and about how to cope with both. It doesn’t make any sense in description, and yet it makes perfect sense while reading.

In other words, it’s a slapstick comedy in literary form. The bleakest slapstick you will ever read, and while it does have Vonnegut’s touches of humanity, this is very clearly a novel where he’s working out his own demons. What was he working out? I feel I can’t explain it, but he will. Literally he opens the book telling you why he wrote it… and it all makes sense, and makes it even more depressing.

This one is unfocused and all over the place (even by Vonnegut standards) and overall it feels like a bit of a mess. It is easily my least favorite of his novels, yet I’m still giving a solid 3 stars. Even at his worst, Vonnegut is able to speak to me in a way that few authors… hell, few humans in general, have ever been able to speak to me.

I’d like to close with just a general note. Vonnegut was not an author to be read for beautiful prose. He liked quick simple sentences, that said only as much as they needed to. Despite that, here he finds a moment or two to bring a touch of awe out of that simple prose. “Standing among all those tiny, wavering lights, I felt as though I were God, up to my knees in the Milky Way.”