Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Jailbird, Vonnegut...
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...
...luxuriously in public--who carries RAMJAC's important documents in the toes of her purple sneakers. She is, of course, from Cambridge, Mass. At the end of the novel, Walter finds himself in a legal mess concerning RAMJAC which will land him in jail once again. Yet, like all Vonnegut heroes, he still believes, like the rest of us, "that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool...
With Jailbird Vonnegut finally succeeeds in meshing the best elements of his previous novels. Starbuck's screwed-up, out-of-control life is grotesquely fictitious, yes; but Vonnegut makes it clear that there, but for the obvious absurdity of the storyline, go we. In Jailbird, Vonnegut's tenth novel, Kilgore Trout a.k.a. Starbuck goes beyond and back-he visits the depths of Harvardiana and survives. The story is inspirational, the Vonnegutisms ("Small world") are typically comforting, and his black humor is as sordid as ever. Jailbird will make you eager for more Vonnegut, and with any luck, Kilgore Trout will...