Slapstick

I went into Slapstick with low expectations. Sweeney considers it to be Kurt Vonnegut's worst book. Vonnegut agrees, having given himself a "D" grade on the project when he considered it his worst novel to date (back when he had written nine of an eventual fourteen). I can see where the negative reaction comes from. The book is sloppy, plot-poor, and full of irreverent obscurities even for a Vonnegut book. Among its many elements are shrinking Chinese people, peak oil, mongoloid twin incest, variable gravitational pull in New York City, the colonization of Mars, a cult religion called "the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped," the ability to communicate with dead people, and a Presidential campaign and reign based on creating artificial extended families for everyone. Now, based on that description alone, I'd have been dying to read Slapstick to see what kind of crazy plot Vonnegut cooked up involving all of those things. The problem is that there's barely any plot at all. The main character is a hideous guy with an equally hideous twin sister to whom he is very close; after she dies, he creates the artificial families out of a sense of lonesomeness. Every other interesting-sounding thing I brought up just kind of happens in the periphery of the novel, and while plenty of it helps build the book's main theme of loneliness, none of it feels like it adds up to a memorable story of any sort. I actually liked Slapstick, and not because I was told to expect not to and I like playing the contrarian or anything like that. There were some real abstract theme-builders and subtleties in here that seemed rare among the Vonnegut bibliography. Unfortunately, there's also a rare lack of any real story to elicit memories or reactions. Personally, I'd still rank this book above at least two others in Vonnegut's catalogue and possibly more. For now, three Vonnegut books remains. Up next? Hocus Pocus.