Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
At this point I've gotten fairly familiar with Kurt Vonnegut's tone and flavor. The sense of universalism and equality consistently sound as often as his humor and irony rings.This books reads as a perversion of all four themes. To me.Usually Vonnegut's works seem to read with some underlying sense that no matter how bizarre everything seems, no matter how depressing or how inspiring a situation seems, there's always a punchline, and that punchline brings you back to reality, forcing the reader to realize that we're all human. We're all prone to make mistakes just as often as we succeeed. We're all prone to die just as sure as we're prone to live. We're all prone for 15 minutes of fame surrounded by an average of 76.4 years of mundaneness. But that doesn't ring the same for Slapstick. The introduction gives you an immediate idea of why Vonnegut steps out of his comfort zone on this one.If the introduction reads true, and there's no guarantee that reality and honesty aren't being blurred in any of Vonnegut's novels, then he wrote this following the death of his sister. His sister, coincidentally, died days after her husband was killed in a freak accident. As if this pit of depression didn't dip far enough down, the couple left a cadre of children that Vonnegut would go on to adopt.So this is understandingly, sympathetically a departure from the Vonnegut norm. The main character is a freak that finds himself surrounded by similarly freakish people. Smartly, the freaks in this novel are those people that perhaps seem the most normal and successful. The main character is a grotesque monster who is a successful pediatrician (though he graduated at the bottom of his Ivy League class), a former Senator, and currently the reluctant President of the United States. He had written the best selling novel about child care with his best friend and twin sister. He has revolutionized mankind's interpretation of family. He is one of the few, healthy survivors left on the Island of Death (Manhattan). He has just sold the Louisiana Purchase to the King of Michigan for a dollar. And he regularly gets an erection.Ok. Fair enough. The novel does take place in a post-apocalyptic future where most humans have been killed by a mysterious plague, Manhattan is a haven of corpses, slaves, and candlesticks, and gravity fluctuates with the weather. The usual science-fiction elements are still in place. However, I do not put this side by side with the normal Vonnegut works, and I cannot. There is not a happy ending. However, in hindsight, I don't believe I've read a happy ending in any of his works. I suppose it's safer to say that there's more of an impending doom with little to no hope of salvation in Slapstick. But, to be fair to the reader, Vonnegut delicately expressed this very early in the book when he compared salvation to a Turkey farm one can communicate with via a lunch box.Read it if you're curious. Read it if you're a Vonnegut fan. Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut if you're neither. Or take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon!I love and miss you, Kurt Vonnegut.
I was prompted to re-read this Vonnegut novel by a non-fiction work that I read recently. The Juggler’s Children was about the use of genetic research in relation to genealogical research and about the search of the modern North American to make some connections with people around them. People are lonely and looking for distant relatives assuages the loneliness somewhat.I was put in mind of this novel and its alternate title, Lonesome No More! I’m not sure why that slogan and the new middle-name scheme espoused by the main character stuck in my mind when all the other details had faded to a hazy blur, but they did. [Each American was assigned a new middle name, a natural object noun and a number—those with the same word are cousins, those with matching word and number are siblings. Voila, instant family!] Like Vonnegut himself, I am lucky to have a large extended family, most of whom seem to enjoy spending time with me as much as I love visiting with them. Also, as a certified introvert, I am perfectly comfortable spending long stretches of time alone--alone but only very rarely lonesome. I do realize, however, that not everyone is so fortunate.KV calls this book semi-autobiographical. It seems to me to be a paen to his relationship with his deceased sister Alice, who he declares he has always secretly written for. I guess we all have an audience in mind when we write and he lost his dearest audience. In Slapstick, Wilbur and Eliza, the freakish twins, who do their best thinking together, are the fictional counterparts of Kurt and Alice. Wilbur is the writer and reader of the two, Eliza is the one who can figure out what is actually going on. Separately, they are much less intelligent, calling their alter-egos Bobby and Betty Brown. If I remember correctly, KV claimed in another work that Alice was actually a much better writer than he was, but did not feel compelled to do something with that talent, as he did.I know what it is like to lose family and how that can affect one’s life. After the death of my mother, I quit reading fiction for many years. Fiction was something that I had shared with her and without being able to talk to her about such books, I just didn’t have the heart to continue reading them. Non-fiction became my go-to reading. So I believe I have some idea how crippling it must have felt to Vonnegut to lose his sister and how he could end up feeling like a much duller Bobby Brown without her. When I read this book in my twenties, prior to losing my parents, I had no proper appreciation of all of this—re-reading the book now, I have much more sympathy. Slapstick contains many of the same themes that make Vonnegut’s writing dear to me: his insistence that common human decency is worth its weight in gold, that kindness is always a good alternative, and that life is has its ridiculous moments even when it hurts.
What do You think about Slapstick Or Lonesome No More! (1999)?
I grew up with this book, though I had never read a page of it until this year. It was a gift from my parents over the holidays, and one with no small degree of significance. Throughout my childhood, my parents had used some of the book's imaginative devices to describe their daily lives, and I came to share this special lexicon with them like any other. It's a heavy gravity day, we used to say. And while other phrases and other books and other writers were a part of the colorful world of language my family inhabited, Vonnegut's work always held a special place at the center of it for me.I will always be grateful to my parents for being readers, for having meaningful relationships with what they read, and for bringing that imagination into my life. I can only believe it has made my life more rich.Strangely enough, Slapstick itself didn't strike me much as a book, though. I think I will always prefer the more melancholic side of Vonnegut, holding Player Piano and Slaughterhouse Five close to my heart, and feeling less at home in Slapstick's fantastic meanderings. Funny that: to feel less at home in a book that gave birth to my home language. Even so, I am grateful to have finally read it, to have seen just how heavy gravity grinds on the characters, and to put a little weight into my own fanciful imaginings. The book remains a gift, in any case, and for that reason I continue to cherish it.
—Jeremy Allan
Vonnegut's most farcical, most absurd, but also one of the more scathing satires. Here Vonnegut takes on universalism, and totalitarianism, but on a grander scale than he allowed in Harrison Bergeron; but also this is more surreal. His genius, though, as seen in other novels, is to creatively intersperse pockets of stark realism to accentuate and to highlight the circus like theme. Vonnegut also uses elements of grotesque to further illustrate his none too subtle rebuke of egalitarianism. This is thought provoking, though, in terms of his over the top humanism and decidedly liberal politics. A good read, and a must read for a Vonnegut fan. A new reader to his canon would be better advised to start with Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle.
—Lyn
In the Green Death ravaged ruins of what was once Manhattan, Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, former pediatrician and the last President of the United States, pens his autobiography on Continental Driving School stationery.Hi ho.It's hard to believe that Kurt Vonnegut has finally moved on to the Turkey Farm, but he has and he is sorely missed. Both by myself and countless others that have enjoyed his unique and hilarious melancholy laden stories.So it goes.Slapstick is one of those books that is difficult for me to review, because it reveals just how limited I am in my critical abilities. It's smarter than I am by a sizable margin. Reading Vonnegut is an experience that is hard for me to explain or describe. He grips my heart and squeezes it to the point of inducing pain, all the while tickling my funny bone with razor sharp jokes that perfectly illustrate how life is just a series of mistakes that takes one by surprise. "History is merely a list of surprises," Swain says at one point. "It can only prepare us to be surprised again." The surprise in Vonnegut's narrative world view is that no one (save for the central character) ever notices that life is just series of mishaps.Hi ho.The humor in Vonnegut's novel(s) is the reader's protective barrier against the pain that lives in the center of the story. If that barrier were ever removed, then the story would become far too painful to endure. This is wonderfully illustrated when Wilbur and Eliza, having lived a dreamlike life of joyous isolation and telepathic genius, make the mistake of thinking that revealing their true nature to their clueless parents and guardians will make things better for everyone.It doesn't.So it goes.And perhaps it was that very mistake, one that ended their own perfect world, that would lead to the very end of humankind. Wilbur and Eliza are Adam and Eve, their isolated mansion is their Garden of Eden, and their eventual decision to reveal their genius is the fall that casts them out of their Garden and into a harsh and uncaring world. One that they are ill-equipped to live in, no matter how smart they might be when allowed to join together in the almost incestuous love of their telepathic genius.The sub-title for Slapstick is Lonesome No More! I am fairly certain that all of Wilbur's actions, up to and including the creation of an artificial mass family for all Americans, are rooted in the loss of his sister and desire to return to the state of ignorant grace that was their childhood. But what is done cannot ever be undone, and the comedic tragedy that is life must to play out in all its chaotic goofiness, one mistake after another.So it goes.Vonnegut is gone, off to an eternity at the Turkey Farm. But his books remain for us to read and enjoy, and they are every bit as vibrant and relevant today as when they were written oh so many years ago. So go read one. Just don't be surprised that you weep while you chuckle. That was the sad and funny genius of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut.Hi ho.
—Chadwick Saxelid
