Everyone's talking Vonnegut on the blog, and I couldn't help but jump back in. Unfortunately, this was one of my least favorite novels of his. (Fortunately, the bar had been set rather high; this wasn't a disappointing book - just a disappointing Vonnegut book.) The highest compliment that I can pay to it is that, two thirds or so of the way through, its myriad cast of interesting and quirky characters reminded me at least a little bit of Catch-22. But the similarities between the books stop there. While Heller's masterpiece used wit and humor to mask a horrifying and tragic, pointed satire, Mr. Rosewater hardly had any plot to speak of at all. In a nutshell, the gist is that a lawyer is trying to cash in by facilitating the transfer of an extremely large amount of money from an eccentric and possibly somewhat crazy man to that man's distant cousin. Vonnegut claimed that the main character in the book was "money," but he never actually made me believe that. All he did was avoid making any other character particularly important to the story at hand. The book ends with a humorous "just desserts" twist that kind of comes out of the blue, but it wasn't enough to justify the overall lack of story in the 270 preceding pages. But that's just my opinion! Six books into Vonnegut's bibliography, I'm very impressed overall. Still, I hope the next few I read are easier to like than this one was. Oh well!
No comments:
Post a Comment