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Kurt Vonnegut's perennial semi-autobiographical protagonist returns this time as Walter F. Starbuck, and he is a Harvard man. He is so much a Harvard man, in fact, that were Vonnegut less obvious in writing his titles this book might well be called Kilgore Trout Goes to Harvard. Vonnegut's hero still peacefully accepts life's highs and lows, but Harvard has changed him: the lows seem a little lower, the highs a little higher, and the accepting a little harder...
...fair, Vonnegut overdoes it at times. Walter Starbuck, a typical Vonnegut face-in-the-crowd personality, has gone to Harvard in the 1930s largely because of family connections with a Harvard man. His most vivid memories are of Harvard, and everyone he meets has had a memorably bad experience with a Harvard graduate. Harvard has given Starbuck a one-way ticket to the top, but it hasn't put out the net to catch him when he falls. And he does fall, of course, only to be thrust on the escalator again by the omnipresent invisible hand that...
Nonetheless, Vonnegut's messages emerge from beneath the overplayed Harvard motif and a typically bizarre plot. Starbuck's biggest claim to fame, for example, amounts to a piddling job in the Nixon administration as the President's Special Advisor on Youth Affairs. His office, hidden in the dank basement of the White House, becomes the resting place for large sums of illicit Watergate pay-off money, and when the break-in and cover-up arrests are made, he is duly escorted to a minimum-security prison in Georgia--undergoing the pains of prison minus the Watergate infamy...
Writing in the first person, Starbuck tells us a story that is a pitifully amusing parody of the John Dean-H.R. Haldeman "Let's Make Money Off of Watergate" autobiographies. And somehow, Vonnegut manages to work in some particularly cogent statements about the mistreatment of Sacco and Vanzetti and the history and problems of the twentieth-century labor movement in general...
Like most of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout permutations, Walter Starbuck wants nothing more than to live simply in a small house with a nice wife and some respectful children. What thwarts his dreams, as usual, is America's tangled red-tape bureaucracy and cut-throat competition, epitomized in Jailbird by the RAMJAC corporation, a sprawling conglomerate that controls almost all of the world's large companies...