I knew what the news would be when I heard the tense of the verb: “Kurt Vonnegut considered himself a secular humanist,” the NPR announcer said. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr died yesterday at the age of 84. I thought I was ready, but I wasn’t.
My ragged copies of Vonnegut’s work date from the 70s. There was no bookstore in my little town, and the school and town libraries certainly didn’t carry anything by Vonnegut, but from time to time a cardboard box of used paperbacks would show up at one of the grocery stores and I would root through it for anything by Vonnegut or my other hero, Ray Bradbury.
Over time, for a quarter or fifty cents a volume, I built up a little collection of books that gave me great pleasure to see on my shelf: Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano, Slaughterhouse Five. What is strange about these comic manifestoes is that they are perhaps more relevant today than when they were published. The Ilium Works has multiplied into a thousand Information Age clones. Ice-Nine still threatens us with global climatic destruction. The slaughterhouse is processing more efficiently than ever.
Vonnegut has often been compared to Mark Twain, and he accepted the comparison. But Vonnegut had something that Twain didn’t have: He was a Hoosier. From Cat’s Cradle:
“My God,” she said, “are you a Hoosier?“
I admitted I was.
“I’m a Hoosier, too,” she crowed. “Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I never knew anybody who was.”
“Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I’ve been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything.”
“That’s reassuring.”
I really missed out…in the 70s I was collecting Jacqueline Susann and Victoria Holt.
My mom had all the Victoria Holts (and her other pen names) — loved them too.
Do kids still pass around paperbacks at school like we did — Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, etc? I suppose they get their kicks on line now.
I don’t know–but they’re really deprived if they’re not learning about sex from underlined passages on the dogeared pages of Jacqueline Susann and Judith Krantz masterpieces.