hdw
20-May-2010, 20:32
As I said in a recent post here, my wife and I played host to a couple of Kurt Vonnegut's distant cousins a week ago. I mentioned this last Saturday to my flute teacher - a very well-read guy with a zany sense of humour and a taste for the surreal and bizarre.
After the lesson I was back out in the street waiting for my bus home when the door of John's tenement block flew open, a dishevelled, bearded figure ran across the street through the traffic, and into my hand he pressed a volume he had just found on his bookshelves - Kurt Vonnegut Jailbird. I've speed-read it so I can give it back to John next Saturday.
It was my first encounter with Vonnegut, and I couldn't put the book down. How the hell do you sum up a Vonnegut novel? His anti-hero Walter F. Starbuck is the son of Russian Polish immigrant Stanislaus Stankiewicz and his Russian Lithuanian wife Anna Kairys. Their rich employer Mr. McCone decides to send their young son to Harvard. "I would be better received at Harvard, he said, if I had an Anglo-Saxon name. Thus did Walter F. Starbuck become my name."
As much of the novel is a satire on American consumerism and the mega-bucks corporations, the choice of the name Starbuck is obviously not random.
Vonnegut also has a lot of fun at the expense of Harvard graduates. "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much". When Walter is jailed for his minor role in the Watergate scandal, he keeps coming across fellow Harvard men in the pen. But his best friend there is one of the guards, Clyde Carter, a distant cousin of a certain president (surnames are never randomly assigned in this novel). Walter and Clyde bond over a correspondence course in bartending, and before long both men are the proud holders of a Doctor of Mixology degree, tho' Clyde goes one better by taking the course in air conditioning as well.
There are only a few women that Walter has truly loved in his misbegotten, accident-strewn life, and they all come back to haunt him. One of them, Mary Kathleen O'Loony, a fellow Harvard graduate (of course), has become a stinking, rotten-toothed old bag lady who shuffles around New York in outsize sneakers carrying her worldly possessions in carrier bags, but she turns out to be none other than the fabled but rarely seen Mrs Jack Graham Jnr., the fabulously rich owner of the RAMJAC Corporation, which makes MacDonald's and General Motors and Chase Manhattan combined look like the neighbourhood grocery store. O'Loony/Graham rounds up some of her deadbeat, Skid Row cronies to run the corporation for her, at mind-blowing salaries which they blow on riotous living.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that this novelistic satire ends in an index of surnames and page-references, the surnames including Spiro T. Agnew, Martin Bormann, Jimmy Carter (4 refs.), George Custer, Salvador Dali, Albert Einstein, Jane Fonda, JK Galbraith, Genghis Khan, Hermann G?ring, Herbert Hoover, Houdini, Ivan the Terrible ...Al Pacino, Saint Matthew, Nero, Robin Hood ... Richard Nixon (16 refs., and a coldly repellent portrait of a human slug), Tutankhamun ... well, you get the idea.
I wouldn't normally approve of a surname index in a novel, but in Vonnegut's novels it's probably a good idea.
Today I went out and bought Slaughterhouse Five.
Harry
After the lesson I was back out in the street waiting for my bus home when the door of John's tenement block flew open, a dishevelled, bearded figure ran across the street through the traffic, and into my hand he pressed a volume he had just found on his bookshelves - Kurt Vonnegut Jailbird. I've speed-read it so I can give it back to John next Saturday.
It was my first encounter with Vonnegut, and I couldn't put the book down. How the hell do you sum up a Vonnegut novel? His anti-hero Walter F. Starbuck is the son of Russian Polish immigrant Stanislaus Stankiewicz and his Russian Lithuanian wife Anna Kairys. Their rich employer Mr. McCone decides to send their young son to Harvard. "I would be better received at Harvard, he said, if I had an Anglo-Saxon name. Thus did Walter F. Starbuck become my name."
As much of the novel is a satire on American consumerism and the mega-bucks corporations, the choice of the name Starbuck is obviously not random.
Vonnegut also has a lot of fun at the expense of Harvard graduates. "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much". When Walter is jailed for his minor role in the Watergate scandal, he keeps coming across fellow Harvard men in the pen. But his best friend there is one of the guards, Clyde Carter, a distant cousin of a certain president (surnames are never randomly assigned in this novel). Walter and Clyde bond over a correspondence course in bartending, and before long both men are the proud holders of a Doctor of Mixology degree, tho' Clyde goes one better by taking the course in air conditioning as well.
There are only a few women that Walter has truly loved in his misbegotten, accident-strewn life, and they all come back to haunt him. One of them, Mary Kathleen O'Loony, a fellow Harvard graduate (of course), has become a stinking, rotten-toothed old bag lady who shuffles around New York in outsize sneakers carrying her worldly possessions in carrier bags, but she turns out to be none other than the fabled but rarely seen Mrs Jack Graham Jnr., the fabulously rich owner of the RAMJAC Corporation, which makes MacDonald's and General Motors and Chase Manhattan combined look like the neighbourhood grocery store. O'Loony/Graham rounds up some of her deadbeat, Skid Row cronies to run the corporation for her, at mind-blowing salaries which they blow on riotous living.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that this novelistic satire ends in an index of surnames and page-references, the surnames including Spiro T. Agnew, Martin Bormann, Jimmy Carter (4 refs.), George Custer, Salvador Dali, Albert Einstein, Jane Fonda, JK Galbraith, Genghis Khan, Hermann G?ring, Herbert Hoover, Houdini, Ivan the Terrible ...Al Pacino, Saint Matthew, Nero, Robin Hood ... Richard Nixon (16 refs., and a coldly repellent portrait of a human slug), Tutankhamun ... well, you get the idea.
I wouldn't normally approve of a surname index in a novel, but in Vonnegut's novels it's probably a good idea.
Today I went out and bought Slaughterhouse Five.
Harry