Word: vonneguts
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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...
Both types of Vonnegut fans--the groupies who thrive on Vonnegut's simplistic reductions of life's problems into phrases like "So it goes," and those who go for his one-of-a-kind style and sarcastic commentary on life in the U.S.--will come away from Jailbird more than satisfied. And if the reader hails from within Harvard's ivy-covered walls, the sense of fulfillment will no doubt prove even more complete--Jailbird is not just another of the current rash of "life after Harvard" novels. Instead, it clearly portrays the vast dichotomy between the way the world...
...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...