Jailbird

With my quest through Vonnegut's fourteen novels dwindled all the way down to two, I recently began to read Jailbird, the only novel of his not yet to have received a post on this blog by someone or other. I was apprehensive going in; the back cover summary made reference to the story being about a fictional Nixon administration nobody who was convicted in the Watergate cover-up. I don't know why - likely because I was born fifteen years later, I'd guess - but I've just never been able to get passionate one way or the other about Nixon and Watergate, and reflections on the saga just kind of bore me. But this was a book written in 1979, so I suppose the issue was still contemporary when Vonnegut chose to pen his ninth novel. My fears for my prospects of enjoying the book were not assuaged by a forty-page prologue from the author himself, describing events both real and fictional to come out of the 20th century labor movements that the story would at some point visit. But once the narrative began to flow a bit, and the flawed protagonist began to recount his life story from a prison cell, Jailbird began to creep up from the bottom of my ranked list of Vonnegut's novels. In his formulaic but effective way, Vonnegut painted a picture of a flawed man whose life turned out the way it did largely because of chance and fate rather than any actions, positive or negative, taken by the man himself. The book takes a few twists and turns before arriving at a melancholy conclusion, not unlike Mother Night, and wound up being a fairly entertaining read. The main character, Walter F. Starbuck, is one of Vonnegut's most sympathetic characters, and although the plot winds on and off of certain topics, most of the individual chapters were either funny, moving, or touching in some way. The emotional climax of the book came when Vonnegut broke from the main story itself simply to revisit the tragic fates of Sacco and Vanzetti, revisiting their executions via electric chair in that special stark, poetic way that only Vonnegut can. This book was a bit of a pleasant surprise for me, but I really shouldn't have been that surprised that I enjoyed it; Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors - perhaps my absolute favorite - of all time, and he gave himself an "A" for the effort in retrospect when grading his own bibliography late in his career. At any rate, I'm down to just one more Vonnegut novel. I've been saving it for last, because it was the first Vonnegut novel posted to the blog at all, way back in August of 2009 by Sween: Galápagos.