Bluebeard

Purely by coincidence, the first six Vonnegut novels I read were also the first six (of fourteen) that he'd written. So I was long overdue for some latter day Vonnegut, and got my fix with 1987's Bluebeard, his antepenultimate novel. Although I'll never know for sure, I think I would have been able to tell that this book was written by an older Kurt Vonnegut than the other six I'd read even if I'd been oblivious to publication orders. The man has seldom been sloppy, but Bluebeard felt refined and immaculately constructed like none of his previous works had. Still present is the quick wit in short paragraph form, but the prose here read so much more rhythmically and methodically than it did in the earlier Vonnegut works. It seems almost like he'd completely mastered his own writing style at this point in his life. (And why not? He was 65 years old by now and had written eleven other novels.) Now, that's not to say that Bluebeard was my favorite of his books so far. It's definitely up there, but "up there" is a vague term when you're talking about the bibliography of one of my all time favorite authors. Know what? I'll worry about ranking his books against one another some other time. For now, I'll draw a comparison between this book and one of Joseph Heller's: Picture This. It's not because the books were published within a year of each other and it's not because each has a painter for a protagonist. It's because both novels feature a narrative that switches back and forth between the past and the present, making social observations and offering commentary on the human condition all along the way. I said that Bluebeard wasn't my favorite Vonnegut book, and after finishing it last night I was actually a bit put off by its ending. In lieu of a tragically ironic twist that symbolizes mankind's follies - a classic Vonnegut move - there's actually a pretty happy and heartwarming conclusion. But after sleeping on it for just one night, I've already "forgiven" the change up and come to embrace it as a key component of the story. After all, what's wrong with happy endings? Well, Entourage is, but still. Anyway, Vonnegut still has seven novels I've never read, but only one of them - Jailbird - is in my current backlog. I've got no specific plans to read it anytime soon, but at the rate I'm scarfing down this particular author, I'd take even odds that it'd be finished by Halloween.