This is a reread. For the purposes of this review, I am gonna skip many of the things you would find in a more bog standard review of a book in favor of some more personal reflections.
I read this book as a very young man, and I am reasonably sure I have gone into this anecdote before somewhere on this blog: When I read this some 20 years ago as a young man, I missed a lot of it. I was probably just 18 when it happened, and I read it with a naive flexibility of a young reader more used to reading science-fiction than anything else. I think I entertained the possibility that Billy Pilgrim really was unstuck in time, and that he was having actual dealings with Tralfamadorians and Montana Wildhack.
So it goes, I suppose.
I can now somewhat laugh off the previous superficial reading I had when I was younger. I picked this up and immediately read this book for what it was – a book about an unwell man suffering through his PTSD, and what his life must have been like through his perspective. It is a confused and disjointed life, and his brain attempts to make sense of it as he can.
Some people in my life recently picked this up, and the recently reprinted Vintage Classics addition that reached my hands was dogeared from multiple readers when it got to me. All of these other readers are young gen-z kids, all of whom talk very openly about their own experience with life trauma and the various mental issues they have or, (to reveal my somewhat curmudgeonly opinion) claim to have. And despite this none of those other readers underlined anything in the book, or made any notes suggesting a lasting impact. They did all claim to enjoy it. I was a bit apprehensive picking it up mostly after my pretty dissatisfied reading of Mother Night. But I am happy to say that I enjoyed this immensely. Even back when I was on a reading kick of Vonnegut’s book (I think I burned through a dozen or so shortly after having read Slaughterhouse-Five) I remember thinking that there was a gulf in quality between some of his books. I am glad to see that I was not just imagining that.
I read somewhere that Vonnegut took some offense once to being called a science-fiction author. And this makes me crack a smile when I try to think about my initial experience with this book. Billy Pilgrim must have come across to me as some kind of a hapless Michael Valentine Smith (Stranger in a Strange Land being the other book I read way too soon to fully appreciate and understand), a reading of which didn’t ever cross my mind this time around. I can see now why Vonnegut might have taken offense to his work being associated with science-fiction at least in the case of this book (Cat’s Cradle and Galapagos, however, will not escape so easily). I don’t know how much space I can waste on this blog going on about what is and is not science-fiction, but to have a worthwhile story here the genre label doesn’t work.
Perhaps the difficulty of it all is how unconventional the story really is. There is nothing anyone can call a narrative structure to what happens here. It feels like someone dropped a vase named Billy Pilgrim, and you are left to pick up the pieces of his life. In a traditional story sense, nothing all that much happens here, and all that remains is a look at this one character. This time around I did notice how much was absent from this character analysis: there is very little mention of Billy Pilgrim before the war. The details of that seem almost irrelevant, and perhaps that is another clue I didn’t pick up on earlier – the unsticking in time is caused by the war, and so these shattered pieces of a person really start from there. Unfortunately, in the course of Pilgrim’s life he never gets put back together again.
This rereading was pretty fruitful, all things considered. Vonnegut is worth reading and rereading. Slaughterhouse-Five deserves the accolades it gets. Should those books float into my life again, I would love a reread of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Probably Cat’s Cradle too.
Failures in Polymathy 