Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s October 2017, and a chubby, graying PR person driving a white Ford Fusion hybrid has just pulled to the shoulder past the Harter Road exit on Route 287 South in New Jersey.
He’s shouting, but there’s no one else in the car.
His radio, which earlier that morning had informed him of yet another mass shooting in America, was now streaming an Audible book. In an otherwise listless narration of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the actor James Franco had just read this passage (read further for the context):
“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again."
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Listen: Bob Varettoni has come unstuck in time.
It’s October 1977, and he is sitting in an undergraduate American literature class at a large Catholic university in northern Indiana. He has not completely read the latest assignment, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” because he did not have the time or (at that time in his life) the nerve to return his copy of the book to the Hammes bookstore (the old small one off the South Quad, not the megastore that graces the campus in 2017).
He had bought the book weeks earlier, but upon starting to read it he was distressed to notice that the binding was flawed. Several of the folios were missing. So whole sections of the novel weren’t included, including the description of Billy Pilgrim viewing a war movie in reverse.
Nevertheless, by that time Bob had already read “Cat’s Cradle” and “Breakfast of Champions” so he concluded he had already read enough of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and gotten the gist of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” to submit a critique – which received an A – stating the author was too clever by half in writing about such a serious topic as the firebombing of Dresden.
Bob smugly recalled this A years later, while watching a Jon Lovitz sketch on “Saturday Night Live.” As Master Thespian, Lovitz would perform a ridiculously self-centered conceit, an over-the-top bit of stage business – which would all be explained and justified by the catchphrase, “Acting!”
That’s the way Bob, for decades, had thought of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” smugly thinking that its Famous Author had (much like this review) called more attention to his craft than to his message:
“And so it goes... WRITING!” “Brilliant!” “Thank you!”
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| Vonnegut and Krementz, a 1978 photo by Saul Leiter. |
An elegant, dark-haired woman approaches Bob to say hello. She’s the photographer Jill Krementz. Bob had recently helped fix problems with her phone service.
Jill greets Bob warmly and turns to introduce her husband – who, a surprise to Bob, is the Famous Author, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Jill invites Bob to sit at their table and whispers something to Kurt. He smiles and asks Bob about his job. “It’s only PR,” Bob demurs. Kurt replies, “Nothing wrong with that…” adding that he used to do PR for GE in Schenectady many years earlier. Soon others are vying for his attention, and panel presentations begin.
The speakers spoke fluent Academia, and sometimes their words struck Bob as unintentionally funny. Bob tried not to react, but caught Kurt’s eye from across the table, and the two had a great time over the next hour conspiratorially exchanging glances. They were, it seemed to Bob, the only people in the room who were in on the joke.
Kurt had a twinkle in his eye, reminding Bob of the times he spent as a boy with his witty, unconventional, larger-than-life grandfather, whose photo he keeps at his desk in his virtual office in the year 2017.In the photo, Bob’s grandfather is nearly passed out drunk at a table, while Bob obliviously plays at his feet. You really can’t see Bob in the photo… just one chubby arm and a sliver of a child’s body in overalls… but somehow, this image never fails to make him happy.
Back in October 1997, Bob gathered his courage at the end of the breakfast, shook the Famous Author’s hand, and said, “I’ll never forget this morning.” Kurt wordlessly bowed, like Master Thespian.
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And now it’s October 2017 again, and Bob Varettoni is driving to work.
He has wearily turned off radio news accounts about someone who had somehow purchased 33 guns in the past year, converted many of them to automatic weapons and stashed them in a Las Vegas hotel suite, from where he then shot 58 people to death the previous Sunday evening.
Instead of listening to more of this, Bob attempts to finally listen to the entirety of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” 40 years after he was originally assigned to read it in class.
The absurd, and clever, genius of the images that followed… the scene’s message of peace and nonviolence, and its literal deconstruction of all the senseless weapons… is the stuff of great literature. Bob got goosebumps as he continued to listen. These words were so utterly unexpected in the context of his life it was as if someone had pried open the top of his head to fill it with something altogether new.
By the time the narrator reached the part about dismantling the cylinders and separating the dangerous contents into minerals and how – touchingly – it was mainly women who did this work, Bob had to pull over to the side of the road to collect his thoughts.
When James Franco continued to read about how the minerals were shipped to specialists in remote areas… about how it was their job to return the minerals to the earth, hiding them cleverly, “so they would never hurt anybody ever again…” Bob pounded his hand against the steering wheel of his parked Fusion hybrid and shouted, “What the hell!... I mean, seriously, what the hell!!”
Perhaps he even used an expletive other than “hell.” He repeated, in astonishment, “What the hell was THAT?”
That was Kurt, the Famous Author, finally saying goodbye.
And so it goes.
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