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Reviewed by Gabriel Ricard

"Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you."
— Mel Brooks

Listen:

By the end of his life Kurt Vonnegut had more or less given up on humanity. Those most familiar with his work weren't all that surprised. A person can only chuckle at the overwhelming insanity of the day-to-day world for so long. Quite frankly it's extraordinary that Vonnegut was able to do this for so long. Most would have given up decades earlier. They would have turned to either insanity or just good, old-fashioned defeatist silence. Some would have tempered their ability to find the punch line with a steady diet of drugs and alcohol. It's true that Vonnegut struggled with depression for much of his life, but almost right up until the end he never lost his ability to find a little bit of humor where most found complete despair. That's certainly admirable, the better for keeping the rest of us from going completely mad. Vonnegut was more skilled at this than just about anybody, and that's still true even after he's left our corner of the universe.

It would have been nice for Vonnegut to perhaps find a little peace when the curtain dropped, and the longtime stand-up gig was finally over.

Had he lived to see Barack Obama assume the Presidency, it's possible Vonnegut might have been able to go out on a high note. For all those wonderful things he wrote, for all those jokes he managed to tell and for all the beauty he managed to find beneath the terrible, it would have been fitting to see that mindset rewarded somehow. It's likely that what kept Vonnegut going, kept those dark comedy jokes coming, was the firm belief that at the finish line good would triumph over evil. That hasn't actually happened yet, but an Obama White House victory might have at least allowed Vonnegut to believe such a triumph still possible. In the final years he possessed little capacity for mankind's redemption after centuries of foolish behavior.

By and large, Vonnegut was considered a satirist, but he was really so much more. He was more than a writer of basic fiction and essays. He was a commentator on the state of the world. One of the sharpest and finest we will ever know. His best work could capture people, their circumstances and their world with inventively characteristic grace, disbelief, and humor.

Like any author, his best writings were the ones that spoke volumes about his own personal obsessions. For Vonnegut, those obsessions included the great cosmic tragicomedy that consisted of humanity in its all pleasantries and horrors, especially through the theater of war. Vonnegut loved to write about people who could best be summed up as unassuming actors. You could look at them as perpetrators or victims, wandering figures in a universe clearly ready to overwhelm their ideas about love, death, happiness, agony and so forth. From these poor folks, a plentiful wellspring of humor. In the end it was all just an extended visit at the last craps table at the end of the world. His characters could take in the sights, enjoy the stage show, and make five trips to the buffet. But never for a moment were they allowed to forget that the house always comes out on top. Some people might not find that to be very funny. Vonnegut didn't have time for people like that, and we as readers don't have to either. We have a wealth of material released during Vonnegut's lifetime to remind us of just how good Vonnegut was at capturing these people and their circumstances.

Better still is that we now have two more books that have been released since his passing in 2007. That's a great advantage of being a writer: if you're lucky people will still want to read you after you're gone. The audience for his work probably won't be disappearing in the near (or even distant) future. High school kids are still discovering books like Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and marveling at how they had failed to find his stuff sooner. The rest of us who have been around awhile should be grateful that Vonnegut was so prolific in his life. His words are as necessary now as they were in the 50s and 60s, when he began writing short stories for the assortment of magazines that published such things. It was through the short story market that Vonnegut was able to quit his job at GM and try his hand at a life of writing.

Over the course of his career, dozens of his short stories were published in magazines ranging from Playboy to Ladies Home Journal. For Vonnegut, like any writer, there were stories that just didn't make the cut. For various reasons never published, they instead had to settle for obscurity. With a less-famous writer, obscurity would be a death sentence. In Vonnegut's case, it was just a matter of time before they found their way into publication.

Most likely, the fourteen stories found in the 2009 release Look at the Birdie just didn't satisfy Kurt's artistic ambition. If they couldn't find a home during his formative years that's one thing, but there's no question these stories were good enough to be published at any point during the height of his fame. It stands to reason that they just didn't say what Vonnegut wanted them to say. In reading them now we shouldn't feel as though we're cheating the late author somehow by being privy to something he didn't want us to read. The harshest critics of a writer's output are often the writers themselves. But it can be a good idea to just step back and see what someone else thinks. Mr. Vonnegut is no longer with us, so unless the rapture occurs sometime soon (which would have amused him to no end) it's safe to say that he has backed off as far as someone can.

His iconic sense of humor can be found throughout Look at the Birdie. Since many of these stories were written during his early years, that wit may not be as pronounced as it would be in later novels like Breakfast of Champions (1973) or Jailbird (1979). But, it's still very much in evidence. You just have to peek under the style and tone that was expected of the kind of fiction that appealed to the popular market during the glory days. Most of these pieces are quite short. The longest one clocks in at less than twenty-five pages. This doesn't leave a lot of room for anything but fast-paced story and character development. If taken at their most basic, stories like "Hall of Mirrors" and "The Nice Little People" will give you the complete essential foundation of an entertaining short story. They and the other twelve are without question excellent examples of the delicate art of the short story, during its most culturally significant time.

It does help to be familiar with Vonnegut's work in order to spot the humor. This is a good collection of short stories, but it's not the place for the novice to begin. You can find that vintage humor of his in stories like "A Song For Selma" and "Little Drops of Water" (possibly my favorite in this collection), but they won't grab your shoulders and shake the life out of you. For that you'll turn to some of his other books. A beginner can enjoy its basic storytelling element, but it will take a longtime fan to really get everything out of it. Either way you can probably breeze through the book in a couple of afternoons. However taken in, it's nearly impossible to deny the sheer talent of these stories. Don't be surprised if one or two of them give you cause to pause in appreciative reflection.

Things are a little different with Vonnegut's other posthumous collection, Armageddon in Retrospect, released in 2008. Unlike Look at the Birdie and its unwritten suggestion you be at least a bit familiar with the man's work, Armageddon in Retrospect fosters a universal appeal right out of the gate. Granted, the pieces will mean different things to different people (my favorite in the whole book is the speech he wrote that was later used for a memorial tribute at Cloves Hall in Indianapolis). The meditations and stories in this book in no way demand a serious insight into what Vonnegut might have written before. Of course, it doesn't hurt to keep in mind that war cropped up in his writing on countless occasions. By the same token, it's not a bad thing to know that he was present during the bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II.

Being aware of all those things is just bonus material for the main event. You can know nothing of Vonnegut and still find a ferocious anti-war perspective that is often at once desperate, enraged, stunned, amused, and a tad even frightened. The jokes here are often bleak and quite cruel. The comedic equivalent of a man putting a brown paper bag over his head and running into a hall of mirrors while on fire. Nothing good will come of something like that, but it strikes a chord. Assuming you do choose to find humor in such things, you're probably not the happiest kid at the birthday party. No one ever accused Vonnegut of that either. Some of these pieces (like "Unknown Soldier") are tragic from first word to last. Even Vonnegut knew when there was nothing funny left to say. As far as his particular brand of comedy goes, it's location varies from item to item. Some pieces are packed with it (the above-mentioned speech or "The Commandant's Desk"). Others wedge it into the plot ("Guns Before Butter" or "Happy Birthday, 1951"). But others reveal the worst of everything and offer no hope, no clever quips ("Wailing Shall Be in All Streets" or "Spoils").

Whatever your mood it's all here, and it's pretty extraordinary. This is unquestionably the triumph of Vonnegut's posthumous career. These stories and opinions represent the very best of the man and his roughly fifty-years of creative expression. You might feel beaten down by the subject matter, but it's hard to ignore just how effective these stories are. They can apply just as easily to the wars they describe as they can to the wars that have since come along. Here be the immortality that most artists seek. Anyone who can write like this and force the reader in so many directions deserves everything that comes to them. Whether or not they're actually alive to benefit from it is irrelevant.

Hopefully there are further surprises in the archives. If not, then so it goes. We have more than enough to enjoy. Still there are rare cases when it's almost impossible for there to be too much of a good thing. Kurt Vonnegut is one of those anomalies. It would take hundreds more books for him to wear out his welcome. It would also take centuries of disinterest for him to lose his urgency. Our society needs voices like his more than ever. Thank God he chose to commit his to words as powerful as the ones found in these two books.

Enjoy and don't be afraid to laugh here and there.

"The World is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."
— H.P. Lovecraft