A Man Without A Country, Kurt Vonnegut
Reviewing Kurt Vonnegut’s final essays
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
September 15, 2005
By Anna Webber
Grandmaster of American Letters Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions) recently released A Man Without A Country, the closest thing the world’s ever come to getting a biography from Vonnegut. With the clear intention that this will be his last work, 82-year-old Vonnegut decides to write his thoughts down before he shuffles off, compiling them into what he sees to be a defunct manifesto to a world chock full of “PP’s” (Psychopathic Personalities), otherwise known as C-Students from Yale and Harvard, the professional guessers that loathe information and the Beatitudes (which is to him, Socialism). Putting aside futility for a moment, he says it all anyway. It’s his warison, a call to arms, a frivolous search for truth through the tender, and the absurd. “If I die—God forbid,” Vonnegut writes, “I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’”
In this collection of short essays written over the period of five of the last six years of his life, he shanks the American democratic capitalist regime into bite-sized, digestible pieces as he reflects on its history, religion, gender, race, his own personal life, and what a bummer it is to be a human being. To this he says, “Life is no way to treat an animal.” He gives fatherly and grandfatherly wisdom, exposes age-old wounds stuffed with the wick of human tragedy over his 82 years, and douses them blatantly in political moonshine.
Each essay is propelled by a menacingly comedic undercurrent, though all with the purest of intentions. “I’m going to tell you some news. No, I am not running for President, although I do know sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.” Vonnegut manipulates his signature strain of black humor as he reflects on the many tragic situations of the world, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, the current War on Terror, et cetera. He skims the tragic situations brought on by America and false religious agendas that are hilariously, not religious at all. He writes that America today “might as well be Poland under occupation.” We got a Dick, a Colon, and a Bush calling the shots… he’ll point you in the right direction to the loo.
As he filets his way through the past, through the present, through his own grim perception of our time-clocked future, he leaves a few jagged chicken bones throughout to send splintering their way through our GI tracts after he swoons us, drenching us with savory wit, only to choke us like dogs. He gives us lessons in creative writing: “First rule, do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” He talks about when he was a little guy scampering around during the depression, making barbed events ripping comedy at the dinner table. Too young to be taken seriously, he got the reactions he craved with his adept, precise humor.
He makes sense of his classification as a “science fiction writer”, recalling that it’s a bunch of baloney, being dubbed as such for the sole reason that he was a Chemistry major at Cornell and wrote about Schenectady, New York in his first book Player Piano. In the novel he mentions a factory, in essence, technology that no one had ever heard of. “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”
Written simply, staunchly, and truthfully, his words flow off the page at a cadence you only encounter in conversation with an old granddad, making it an easy read. It’s shrouded in the same loving advice Vonnegut would give to his own children. This book is a sort of Q&A with Kurt, but the only one questioning and answering is Vonnegut himself, sometimes a cranky, crotchety old man, sometimes so simply wise, so authoritative, so absolutely trustworthy, he’ll so easily soften the hearts of his readers. And he’ll call you a “twerp” if you don’t go out today and purchase his suggested reading list.
At one point he tells us, “To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” He emphasizes that the world sucks, that the dirt bags of our past fundamentally destroyed the path of humankind, but “no matter what era in human history, everybody just got here… all these games already going on that could make you crazy even if you weren’t crazy to begin with.” Get on with your day, he emphasizes. Create something. Be happy. “At least we’re still alive!”
