Word: edens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...EDEN EXPRESS by MARK VONNEGUT 214 pages. Praeger...
Vonnegut is not a bad name to have on a book if one is simply interested in marketing a name brand. But Mark Vonnegut, son of Kurt, has considerably more on his mind. He has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Eden Express is his attempt to describe the slippage in and out of madness, to distinguish between the chaos in his head and the confusion of the world and, finally, to achieve a balance between romantic myths about sick minds and the cold evidence that his own disorder is the product of abnormal body chemistry. The result...
...sued his ambitions at IBM with as much single-mindedness. Mark had all the inverted status symbols: a trusty old Volkswagen, a loyal mongrel dog, a commune in a good neighborhood and a larder stuffed with choice grass and macrobiotic snacks. But there is a serpent in every Eden; Mark's was mental illness...
...sure I could live in a plastic condominium with a wife I didn't love and lots of bratty kids . . . I wouldn't like it but it wouldn't drive me nuts," he writes, unaware of the brattiness implied by such conjecture. Yet in the end, Eden Express is a painfully honest document of a life in transition. The shift is even evident in the book's style. The early pages contain the sort of hippie jargon that franchises experience into junk food for thought. But by the end, Vonnegut has found a truer, more subdued...
...only kid show to avoid entirely is SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON (ABC, Sunday, 7 p.m. E.D.T.). The grand old dream of escape from civilization to an island Eden has been thoroughly polluted, not least by the fact that this family comes not from Switzerland but from suburbia. They seem to have plenty of food and water out there on their atoll, but they are going to bore themselves to death in a month or so-and the viewer with them. Richard Schickel