Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, silencing a champion of humanistic values and a critical intelligence who was never afraid to pole a stick at the grizzly bears who hold power in this country.
Vonnegut was a hard writer to characterize. Ostensibly a science fiction writer, he was far more — a caustic social critic, a religious skeptic, a humorist.
He was, as the novelist Norman Mailer said in a statement (published in the Associated Press story to which I’v e linked above), ”a marvelous writer with a style that remained undeniably and imperturbably his own. … I would salute him — our own Mark Twain.”
While “Slaughterhouse Five” gets most of the ink, my favorite novel of his is “Mother Night” (it’s the least sci-fi of the bunch). It a book that challenges our easy conceptions of the world — an alleged Nazi spy is on trial in Israel, but we made to consider his actions and question his guilt. It is one of those rare books that forces you to read it cover to cover in a sitting, but challenges you, drags you into questions you might not wish to ask leading to answers you might not wish you’d learned.
I’ll close this with a comment from The Washington Post’s the Achenblog:
Why did we love him so?
Because Kurt Vonnegut told us the truth about living in a world gone mad. And he somehow made us laugh along the way. That’s winning the perfecta.
Yes, it is.
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Hank Kalet 