Slapstick

published	1999 by Dial Press Trade Paperback
binding	Paperback
isbn	0385334230 (isbn13: 9780385334235)
pages	288
description	Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of ...more [close] Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. (Super-intelligent, miniaturized Chinese watch the West self-destruct from the sidelines.) Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern, then moved to deserted New York City, where he writes a thoughtful missive before death. In Slapstick, Vonnegut muses on war, man's hubris, and the awful, crippling loneliness humans are freighted with--but, miraculously, the book still manages to delight and amuse. Absurd, knowing, never depressing, Slapstick kindles hope--for the possibility of wisdom, perhaps; for human resiliency, surely. It's best to end with a quote from the prologue wherein the author discourses on The Meaning of It All, or at least This Book: "Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go off looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, 'Please--a little less love, and a little more common decency.'" Amen.
date added	12-13-06 edit book

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Paul rated it:

(review of isbn 0385289448)

09/19/07

bookshelves: pauls_vonnegut_shelf

Read in September, 2007

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, forcin...more 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....less

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