Word: starbuck
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Walter F. Starbuck, Vonnegut's hero and narrator, keeps getting his life sidetracked by great wealth. The son of immigrant servants, he was informally adopted by his parents' millionaire employer, raised as a gentleman and sent off to Harvard. In his early 60s, after an on-and-off career in Government service, he finds himself buried in an obscure job with the Nixon White House. So remote is his office that it becomes the perfect hiding place for a trunk containing a million dollars in unlaundered bills. Starbuck is sent off to a minimum-security prison in Georgia...
...complicate the unbelievable, she and Starbuck had been Communists in their youth. His zeal has withered with age, but not hers. "After I die," she tells Starbuck, "you look in my left shoe . . . You will find my will in there. I leave the RAMJAC Corporation to its rightful owners, the American people." Starbuck is dazzled by the purity of her motive but convinced that her act will make not one whit of difference to the way people live: "The economy is a thoughtless weather system - and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing...
This plot is loose and baggy enough to give Vonnegut plenty of leg room, and he strolls about at will. He offers a lengthy account, for instance, of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and of their subsequent executions in the 1920s. Not all of the digressions are somber. Starbuck meets Nixon and finds the President's smile "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." The hero's meditations on money are childlike enough to produce odd insights. On his first morning of freedom, Starbuck leaves his seedy hotel to buy a newspaper...
...less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve...
Imagine a Harvard grad ('35) and Washington bureaucrat named Walter Starbuck so scandalously long playing that he gets involved first in Hiss-Chambers and then three decades later in Watergate. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut did, turning the tale into Jailbird, his first book in three years, which will be published this fall. His next book may well take longer to write since Vonnegut, summering on Long Island, has taken to canoeing just as he did as a boy on an Indiana lake. "It is especially pleasant," he explains, resting on his literary oar, "not to paddle...