Word: vonnegut
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Television is almost always unsettling and amazing when one thinks about it. It imposes upon America a strange simultaneity, if not a unity. It makes for a coast-to-coast viewers' version of what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. called a granfalloon, a wholly artificial brotherhood. TV characters themselves, whatever good lines their writers give them, almost inevitably have the flat soulless quality of people dropped on earth and hatched from a pod. Maybe it's the electron dust on the screen...
...Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut had a fantasy that time and gravity could be reversed, and that the bombs rained down upon Europe in World War II could reassemble themselves. The billions of blasted fragments would magically recombine, rescinding the destruction they had done. The bombs, made whole again, would float up into the bomb bays of the planes that had dropped them, and the planes would fly backward, back home, where the bombs would be disassembled and all their metals and explosive powders redeposited in the earth so they would be harmless and all the death would be repealed...
...KURT VONNEGUT'S MONKEY HOUSE (Showtime, May 15 and 20). Three adaptations of short stories by the sci-fi fabulist. Hardly first-rate Vonnegut (more like second-rate Rod Serling), but more fun than most anything else on TV this month...
...book's tone is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's novels never fasten down on a specific moment in time and progress from there. Some of his more memorable characters are the couple on airplane in Cat's Cradle, who boast that they are Hoosiers. Natural, comfortable feelings of closeness are never present in these novels, whose characters find satisfaction only in artificial, relatively cold institutions...
...Vonnegut is also known for his wit and ability to create bizarre characters by finding the irony in everyday life. Bradley, too, has this ability, and takes advantage of it to inject his novel with a sharp wit and satire...