Word: vonnegut
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fame has a way of ruining a writer's reputation. Take the case of Kurt Vonnegut, who became a cult figure in the late '60s after enduring years of hard-earned obscurity. A growing army of high school and college readers began proclaiming him a deep thinker, at about the same time that critics started cuffing him for being a shallow artist. Both judgments were wrong. Vonnegut has never written a thought that could not occur to a sporadically meditative teenager, nor has he pretended to; those who are impressed by the profundity of a shrug...
...parables written out of anger at some inexplicable kink in the collective psyche: blind trust in science and scientists (Cat's Cradle); faith in war as a rational activity (Slaughterhouse-Five). After a lengthy period of mellowed-out serenity (and two mediocre novels, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick), Vonnegut is mad again. His target in Jailbird is money, specifically the odd systems that people have invented for distributing and withholding...
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...
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...
Such touches are vintage Vonnegut...