Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano and Grading Debut Novels on a Curve

Debut novels are interesting. I’m a big Vonnegut fan. I’m planning to read all of his novels and then get a tattoo of the asshole he drew in Breakfast of Champions (that is not a joke, and please don’t tell my mom). Player Piano is an instructive look into the early thoughts of one of my favorite authors, but it’s definitely one of his weaker books.

Vonnegut’s short stories have been justly criticized. Most of them are phoned-in moneymakers, sad relics of the (woefully?) bygone era when short stories were still literary commodities of financial importance. Player Piano does not suffer from that particular failing, at least. It’s just really damn preachy. The novel describes a sad utopia where machines have made all but the very brightest human engineers obsolete, regulated to busy-work and menial, unfulfilled drudgery. Vonnegut makes that unfortunate mistake of many young novelists, that of both writing a book around a narrow philosophical treatise (humans are dehumanized without meaningful work) and then spitting that thesis out of his/her characters’ mouths. He’s not stooping to Ayn Rand levels here, but there’s a lot of it, and it’s pretty painful.

This major flaw certainly weakens the book quite a bit, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it spoils the thing completely. It’s still damn funny, and the earnestness that manifests itself badly in the form of a harping philosophical soapbox in narrative dress finds a much happier outlet in both touching moments of human unease and in the kind of black comedy that drew me to Vonnegut as a younger reader. It’s a strong, albeit deeply flawed, first effort, and it points at all the interesting places Vonnegut went as he strengthened his craft and sense of subtlety.

Recommendation: Read Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle instead, unless you’re dead set on really getting into Vonnegut’s back catalog.

Hesse’s “Siddharta”

This one wasn’t for me. Hesse’s popularity as a countercultural icon in America seemed to have led to this book becoming the subject of Zeitgeist-fixation, but in spite of very moderate expectations, I was completely underwhelmed. The narrative of the searcher is fine, but nothing of any particular interest, and the titular character’s linear progression toward The Meaning of Life left no room for any interesting subtlety. Hesse’s prose was equally unremarkable.

I can see how this kind of book might be a powerful experience for an intelligent and emotionally sensitive young teen. More power to them. It’d be a hell of a lot better than reading Divergent or John Green books. At them same time, unless some rather compelling reasons make themselves known, I’ll wander past Hesse’s other offerings.



Siddharta
by Hermann Hesse

“Rabbit Redux”, Or, John Updike is The Man (and you are free to interpret my use of the phrase “The Man” however you like)

John Updike gets a lot of shit. Some of that is very deserved. His preoccupation with white male middle-class identity rubs many people the wrong way. The perspective in much of his fiction is inescapably male, and with an inescapable male view of women. This has led to a bit of a backlash against the man in feminist circles. Updike is also an incredibly conventional straight, white, Anglo-Saxon protestant. It’s not very hip to be that square.

But the guy can write. While it’s certainly possible to make some well-substantiated claims of anti-feminism against the guy, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that most of the hate is rather blind. There’s no lack of compelling and nuanced female characters in this book, (the second one in his “Rabbit” quadrilogy) and any complaints about Updike’s women being flawed and unlikable seems to gloss over the point that everyone in these books is pretty flawed and unlikable. Rabbit himself is sexually repressed, vulgar, and uneducated. He’s a racist and a misogynist who isn’t really any good at anything, and he’s a chronic user of people. Updike’s book is -if anything- a brutal critique of American masculinity. The unfavorable perspectives on femininity are (unfortunate) collateral damage.

And despite whatever criticism you may have of the subject matter… the guy can write. All four novels are in the present tense, full of powerful and immediate prose. I can’t imagine being interested in reading a suburban drama about the lives of small-town white people in 1969 America, but Updike makes these unlikable and unremarkable people so incredibly compelling and full of importance. The emotional resonance and the compelling nature of the reading experience are all borne out of his prose itself, not the events taking place within it.

Recommendation: Read it. This shit is literary canon and literary gold. One of the best books of 2015 for me.



Rabbit Redux
by John Updike

Reading Log: Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There

My girlfriend picked this up, read it in a day or two, then passed it on to me. I’d never heard of it (or seen the Academy Award-winning movie) and I thoroughly enjoyed the read. It’s 140 pages, but an incredibly easy and short read that wouldn’t be difficult to finish in a single day. I was fortunate enough to go into it knowing only that it was in some way a satire of life in the 60s, and it’s always refreshing (and rather rare) to begin reading something in near-total ignorance.

I understand how this book became a film. It’s extremely cinematic and plotted out simply, in distinct scenes. The prose is understated, but very good, getting out of the way and communicating everything we need to know with brevity and precision. It all flows so incredibly quickly; even though the entire book remains firmly in the realm of satire it never even begins to approach the limits of credulity -no easy task. Kosinski plays with the line between true idiotic simple-mindedness and the affected simplicity of the powerful and articulate (himself included, perhaps). Minimalism can be an obfuscation, rather than a paring-away into revelation. This ties in with his pervasive meditation on the nature of the self as an image of oneself- distinct as a character, made possible by the advent and mass dissemination of television.

It’s a damn good book, and it’s just as relevant now as it was in 1970. Give it a read.

 

Being There
by Jerzy N. Kosinski

Reading Log: John Cavanagh’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn (A 33 1/3 Book)

Yup, more rock journalism. I’m not tired of it yet.

Cavanagh sights in perfectly here, focusing on the album itself and only touching on the tumultuous events that followed (the mental illness and loss of frontman Syd Barrett). He introduces us to a massive cast of characters, and while I was never able to draw a round picture of anyone in particular, the movement and the era were captured perfectly, an uncorrupted glimpse into an incredibly interesting time and place.

Cavanagh isn’t the most sophisticated writer, but any shortcomings in his prose are offset by his boundless enthusiasm for all things Pink Floyd (focused on Piper, of course). It’s infectious, and his liberal use of exclamation marks -a practice that normally sets my teeth on edge- is endearing. This isn’t literary fiction. It’s a guy who’s madly in love with a piece of art, talking to all the people involved in making it and distilling the result into something accessible enough for the casual fans/passers-by and involved enough for the fanatics.

It’s a great story, it’s a great album. A book like this can go wrong so easily; veering off into inside baseball and the exclusionary, referential language of rock-geekdom, obsession over the dramatic tabloid celebrity or even sinking into saccharine nostalgia. This book is none of those things. It’s exactly what it claims to be; the celebration of a great moment in musical history, supported by an exhaustive body of interviews with the people who made it happen.

Recommendation: Read if you like Pink Floyd, counterculture, or good stories about weird shit. Pass if you hate exclamation marks or genuine enthusiasm.

Pink Floyd: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (33 1/3 Series)
by John Cavanagh