Mother Night

Here's a Vonnegut book several people I know have spoken highly of, and it's warranted. Vonnegut often gets lumped into the "sci-fi" genre because a lot of his books require science fiction as a plot device- the time travelling in Timequake and Slaughterhouse 5, accelerated evolutionary biology in Galapagos, and doomsday devices in Cat's Cradle. But Vonnegut can hold his own in stories that are grounded in reality, and he does just that with Mother Night. The book contains an "autobiography" of Howard Campbell Jr, an American living in Germany before the start of WWII who is recruited to become an American spy. To do this, he has to spit some Anti-Semitic invective over the radio to inspire the Nazis, but at the same time he's delivering coded messages for the American side. What he's coding, he doesn't know, and who's listening, he also doesn't know. In fact, he can hardly prove he's on the American side at all- Howard's only connection is to a single other man in the army, who rarely communicates with him. I found it a pretty novel idea- Howard is so good at being a spy that he becomes unable to prove he's a spy, and eventually is tried for his war crimes. The book takes part mostly long after he's returned to America to no hero's welcome- he lives in a shitty apartment with small funds from the government, trying to avoid getting caught by anyone. Of course eventually he's found out and a bunch of racists, Communists, and a former lover all want a piece of him. The rest of the events unfold in a typical Vonnegut fashion, all pointing to the moral of the story- "We are what we pretend to be." Despite thinking that the Nazis were awful people and serving America the whole time, there was little in Howard's actions to indicate he was not a Nazi. Mother Night was a quick one that didn't meander nearly as much as some of Vonnegut's other novels, but was still one of the better ones and I'd recommend it to any fan of his.