Mother Night

I usually try to refrain from reading multiple books by the same author consecutively for one reason or another, but since I have plenty of Vonnegut to get through (four more books even after this one's completion) and since I'm enjoying his writing so far, I figured I'd go right ahead and treat myself to Mother Night after finishing Cat's Cradle. And I'm glad I did so. As I said in my post about Cat's Cradle, that book fell just a bit shy of my expectations. In Mother Night, however, we've got one of Vonnegut's lesser known works. I had no expectations going in and I was impressed and entertained all the same. I'll spoil nothing, except the premise: Howard Campbell is being held in Israel to be tried for war crimes as a Nazi in World War II. But Campell was actually operating as an American spy; he spewed antisemitic propaganda on the radio in Germany, but also broadcast information to American forces in code at the same time. Yet he was such a masterfully covert agent that no one now believes his story to be true. Rather than an American hero, he is recognized both at home and internationally as a Nazi sympathizer. The moral of the story, as Vonnegut admits right off the bat in the introduction, is that "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Of course, in typical Vonnegut fashion, he immediately amends that moral by saying that perhaps the real moral is that "when you're dead, you're dead," before finally deciding at the end of his introduction that another moral has just occurred to him: "Make love when you can. It's good for you." So, yeah. Classic Vonnegut. It wasn't quite Slaughterhouse-Five, but I enjoyed Mother Night a great deal just the same.