And So It Goes - Kurt Vonnegut: A Life - By Charles J. Shields - Book Review

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields's sad, often heartbreaking biography, "And So It Goes," that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did try to flag down Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and booze), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But then Vonnegut's relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was 21, his mother successfully committed suicide — on Mother's Day.

It's a truism that comic artists tend to hatch from tragic eggs. But as Vonnegut, the author of zesty, felicitous sci-fi(esque) novels like "Cat's Cradle" and "Sirens of Titan" and "Breakfast of Champions" might put it, "So it goes."

Vonnegut's masterpiece was "Slaughterhouse-Five," the novelistic account of being present at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945. Between that horror (his job as a P.O.W. was to stack and burn the corpses); the mother's suicide; the early death of a beloved sister, the only woman he seems truly to have loved; serial unhappy marriages; and his resentment that the literary establishment really considered him (just) a writer of juvenile and jokey pulp fiction, Vonnegut certainly earned his status as Man of Sorrows, much as Mark Twain, to whom he is often compared, earned his.

Was Kurt Vonnegut, in fact, just that — a writer one falls for in high school and college and then puts aside, like one of St. Paul's "childish things," for sterner stuff?

This vein of anxiety runs through Shields's diligent, readable but uneven biography. But the question seems self-answering: when did you last reread "Slaughterhouse" or "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater"? That long ago? So, when did you last read "Huckleberry Finn" or "To Kill a Mockingbird"? Or we could just crunch the numbers: in the first six months of 2005, "Cat's Cradle," published the year John Kennedy was assassinated, sold 34,000 copies; "Slaughterhouse" sold 66,000. Most of those are probably being read in the classroom. But so what? You want to shout across the River Styx: "It's O.K.! Cheer up!"

Vonnegut and the other great "comic" (or if you prefer, ironic or tragico-comical-ironic) novelist of World War II, Joseph Heller, are getting their biographical due, almost simultaneously. Tracy Daugherty's fine biography of Heller was recently published, in time for the 50th anniversary of "Catch-22."

There are some odd synergies. The two met years after their wars, onstage at a literary festival in 1968, and became great friends and eventually neighbors. Heller's war was up in the air, as a bombardier in the nose cone of a B-25. Vonnegut's was at ground level, as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, and ultimately beneath ground level, in the basement of Schlachthof-Fünf during the firebombing.

Both men were profoundly, and with respect to their war novels, specifically influenced by the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Both their novels were numerically titled — Heller had to retitle his original "Catch-18" when Leon Uris brought out his "Mila 18."

In a detail that struck me as, well, weird, Vonnegut's breakthrough moment while he was trying to get a handle on how to write his novel came during a visit to a war buddy — in Hellertown, Pa. More ironic is that both World War II novels ended up being Vietnam novels.

Heller's appeared in 1961, just as American pacificists were starting to ask, What are we doing here? Didn't the French try this? "Catch-22" became an existential field manual for the antiwar movement, and a must-read for the grunts and soldiers doing the fighting. Vonnegut's novel came out in March 1969, by which time the question had pretty much been answered. It made him famous — the proverbial "voice of a generation" (always a problematic title) — and a Pied Piper to disaffected American kids. It also made him rich.

Christopher Buckley's novel about China, "They Eat Puppies, Don't They?," will be published next year.

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