Deadeye Dick

What, you thought we were all done with Kurt Vonnegut here? We were just taking a little four-month break. That break ended somewhere over the Eastern Seaboard earlier tonight when I finished Deadeye Dick, a lesser known Vonnegut novel from the later middle portion of his novel-writing career. I'm left without much to say, other than to more or less repeat what I said about the last Vonnegut book I read: that it was quintessential Vonnegut, through and through. I understand how uninventive and douchey I sound, describing a book by using the author's last name and expecting it to suffice as an actual adjective, but if you've read a lot of this man's works then you know exactly what I mean. Nonetheless, I'll attempt to redeem myself with an explanation, which may seem superfluous to those who completely understand what "Vonnegut" means when used to describe a work of fiction. It told a fictional man's life story, more or less chronologically, but not without skipping back and forth a great deal. Most pages have multiple section breaks, and the narrative consists mostly of extremely brief anecdotes and straightforward depictions of events. Tragedy abounds, but it does so with a tone you can't help but find humorous. There are oddly specific absurdities and yet huge events - the nuclear bombing of an American city, for instance - go largely undescribed. The entire novel carries a very slight and yet undeniable sense of apology and guilt, as though the narrator or the author is really embarrassed about some of humanity's lesser qualities. Vonnegut uses gentle and simple motifs for heavy concepts like life and death, referring to the latter as a person's "peephole" closing. Most plot developments are outright given away ahead of time thanks to the book's very bouncy sense of time and the way it passes, and at the end of the book it's not as though some great story has been told, but you're glad to have spent 250 to 300 pages reading about these memorable and quirky characters and their utterly bland lives. Here are some highlights, which I'd normally consider spoilers, but, again, it's Vonnegut, so he goes right ahead and tells you every major event that'll happen before it happens anyway.

• The narrator's father spent a lot of his formative years as a very close friend of Hitler's. This made World War II an especially awkward time for the main character, as whenever he would invite friends over, his father would go on at length about Hitler not really being so bad a guy.
• The narrator's mother eventually dies from cancer caused by radiation poisoning. The source of this radiation was her own fireplace's mantle, which had been made from re-purposed cement that had once been used to store plutonium during the Manhattan Project.
• The narrator, while cleaning his father's rifle as a twelve-year-old, fires a bullet off into the sky. It hits a pregnant housewife in the forehead, killing her, on Mother's Day.
• Again, the narrator's hometown ends up being destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Or, more accurately, all of the people in the town are killed by the bomb, whose blast is purely radioactive, or something, and thus leaves all the buildings in the town perfectly intact. Although it kills a hundred thousand people, the story is "old news" within a few days since the only stuff everyone else cares about - namely, material objects - is left unharmed. That's KV Jr. for you, subtle as a brick, yet endearingly straightforward.
• The novel's final words are "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet." If this were the moral, the ultimate takeaway, of Deadeye Dick, I'd have to call it the darkest and most depressing yet of the Vonnegut novels I've read. But the bulk of the book feels too nostalgic and charm-driven for that depressing outlook.
• Perhaps a better-suited quick and effective summing up comes with the following: "If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is." Vonnegut was 60 when this novel was published; this line comes close to, but not at, the end of the book. To me, the book even drags on a bit at the end and loses some steam around the two-thirds mark. Still, based on that quote, this is almost perfectly fitting. The book is not over, but the story is. (Also, the book's epilogue is longer than any other chapter.)

 So, yeah, just an all-around treat once again from Kurt Vonnegut. I've now read nine of his novels and the final five are on my bookshelf and in my backlog. Let me mimic Sweeney's recent Saramago post and give a preliminary cut of my overall Vonnegut novel rankings:

1. Slaughterhouse-Five - nightmarish and depressing depictions of war and one man's utter apathy toward all the death and suffering around him, in addition to non-chronological time flow, make for one of my favorite books of all time

2. The Sirens of Titan - an engrossing and whimsical space-based adventure from cover to cover

3. Mother Night - managed to keep taking the "major plot twist" trope one step further by playing fast and loose with character identities and allegiances

4. Deadeye Dick - got bored with this one once the ending came, but was great up until then

5. Cat's Cradle - very bored with this one until the ending, but what a great ending it was

6. Bluebeard - definitely liked it when I read it, but can't recall much aside from the basic plot and a few characters

7. Breakfast of Champions - a real treat to read but I remember next to no plot details or characters at all

8. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - this lawyer story just never clicked for me

9. Player Piano - probably not a terrible book, but there's no flavor at all to the text, the characters, or the plot, and that left me bored as hell by the third chapter or so

Hey, that's two lists in one post. How sloppy of me. Whatever. Happy Friday.