Look at the Birdie

It’s time to take a break from my recently adopted five-paragraph format.

This is the third straight summer in which I’ve read a Kurt Vonnegut short story compilation. Like While Mortals Sleep - which I wasn’t big on - Look at the Birdie contains around 250 pages of previously unpublished material. But Look at the Birdie had the benefit of coming out in 2009, two years before While Mortals Sleep, and as a result it’s noticeably better. This makes sense; the well of unpublished Vonnegut short stories only runs so deep, and every time you take a dozen or more acceptable ones it dries up a little more. After two or three collections of twenty stories each, you’re left with a situation where stories that didn’t crack the top fifty at the time of Vonnegut’s death are now some of your best available options.

Anyway, I mostly enjoyed Look at the Birdie, and since there were only fourteen stories in this one, I think I can touch on each one of them.

“Confido”

A man invents an earpiece that amplifies internal thoughts into actual voices, audible only to the people wearing the earpiece. He thinks he’ll strike it rich - who, after all, doesn’t want a little voice reassuring them that every opinion they have is correct? It goes about as well as you’d expect, amplifying dark thoughts and generally causing jealousy, paranoia, and depression - a classic Vonnegut take on the nature of man, right down to a sort-of optimistic ending.

“F U B A R”

There wasn’t much to this one. A man with an isolated and terrible office job gets a young and lively assistant assigned to him, and everything immediately changes for the better. No twist, no punchline. A happy little story, but completely inconsequential.

“Shout About It from the Housetops”

One thing Vonnegut has always done very well with his whackier characters is toe the line between believable quirkiness and completely absurd insanity. I liked this story about a couple with a rocky marriage and the traveling salesman who saves it, and the highlight for me was the way the wife was introduced: violently pumping water out of a well in the backyard and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Ed Luby’s Key Club”

By far the longest story in the collection, this one clocks in at 52 pages and is broken into two parts. I loved it. It starts when a modest man takes his wife out for an anniversary dinner and ends after a couple of murders, a jailbreak, and a statewide manhunt. It was gripping and tense in ways that Vonnegut has never really been before and I absolutely loved it. It also ends in a completely satisfying manner, which is no small feat.

“A Song for Selma”

This one featured a recurring Vonnegut short fiction character: George Helmholtz, high school music teacher. I’ve never really enjoyed that particular anthology, but this one was alright. One of George’s most promising students has dropped out of his music class unexpectedly, while another completely oafish student is suddenly showing great interest in the class. The explanation, once revealed, is pretty funny and satisfying, and the story manages to find a nice ending.

“Hall of Mirrors”

I loved this one. Two detectives visit an eccentric old hypnotist on a missing person investigation. The hypnotist slowly pulls them under his control in order to escape from the pickle he’s in. Or does he? The policemen seem to think they’re duping the hypnotist into believing they’re under his control in order to draw a confession from him. After a few layers of “gotcha!” play out, there’s a well-earned concluding twist.

“The Nice Little People”

A man discovers six quarter-inch-sized people while waiting for his wife to come home from work on their anniversary. He plays around with them for a little while, but the climax of the story has nothing to do with the little people whatsoever, and instead deals entirely with the man’s marriage.

“Hello, Red”

This was the first true dud in the collection for me. A soldier - or maybe a sailor? - returns from spending nearly a decade overseas only to find that the woman he loved has moved on to another man. There was just nothing profound or entirely interesting here for me, even if the idea was fruitfully melancholy.

“Little Drops of Water”

A second straight stinker, unfortunately, and this one’s got even less to say. A man ill-suited for relationships gets married, I think, but if he does it doesn’t happen until the end. Honestly, this and “Hello, Red” sort of blur together for me. I remember nothing about this one with any level of certainty.

“The Petrified Ants”

Two Russian ant scientists discover that prehistoric ants were actually incredibly complex creatures who built great societies with houses and wheels and literature. And then some ants evolved to have giant pincers, and in short time they killed all of the other ants, and today all ants are just savage and mindless and slavish to a central power. This was an enjoyable but fairly flat and blatant metaphor for the arms race, and it appropriately ends with the two scientists doing time in a Siberian labor camp.

“The Honor of a Newsboy”

A murder investigation hinges on whether or not a newsboy delivered the newspaper to a prime suspect on Wednesday night. The newsboy swears he did; the suspect swears he didn’t. And for the investigator, defending the honor of a ten-year-old kid suddenly becomes more important than the issue of whether or not the suspect committed the murder. An enjoyable but largely forgettable tale.

“Look at the Birdie”

Very unsettling, and also the only tale in the collection told from a first-person perspective. The narrator meets a hitman at a bar, and the hitman takes his picture. The implications are dark as hell, and it's kind of weird to me that the publisher chose to use this story to represent the collection as a whole. I'd have gone with "Hall of Mirrors" personally, but what do I know?

“King and Queen of the Universe”

Two rich and naive teenagers spend a night seeing how shitty life can be for those without money or privilege, and they end up much better off for it. It would have been easy to make the rich kids terrible little brats, but Vonnegut instead manages to find all kinds of sympathy in their growth arcs.

“The Good Explainer”

The collection ends on a real gut punch, and while I won't spoil it, I'll say that it involves a man and woman at a fertility clinic and a secret burden from years gone by.

All in all, a great collection, and with its completion I've got just one Vonnegut book left in the backlog - his famous 1968 collection of short stories called Welcome to the Monkey House.