Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Audiobook.

I had a friend back in Pittsburgh who was incredibly smart and very kind and funny, but had a tendency toward literary snobbishness. (I know: can you imagine such a person?) Once he had something disparaging to say about Kurt Vonnegut, I can't remember exactly what. Some well timed comment that pretty much wrote him off as a hack, and I recall being almost hurt by it, seeing as how Vonnegut wrote so much stuff I loved as a teen.

And I guess that's maybe the rub. I loved Vonnegut as a teen. Sure I only read Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle and the collected stories. Breakfast of Champions. Slapstick? I read like five of his books. Timequake, six. And so when I found this audiobook I thought it would be a good one to listen to on my trip.

It was not good. Vonnegut's Redistribute All Wealth moral is completely overbearing, and so whatever aims for satire seemed to just fall off to dumb and obvious caricature. (Quickest plot summary ever: The scion of a wealthy family is crazy, maybe, but just so crazy that he considers actually helping people rather than using them to create more wealth.) The final scene reads only like a punchline. I could practically hear the rimshot at the end of the book, and this is no way for a novel to end. Maybe a short story, which form maybe Vonnegut should have reserved for this story.

Also, I don't understand why he has such a loathing, in this novel, for dependent clauses joined with anything other than a stupid, belchlike comma. Let me cue up one of the chapters at random and write the first example I hear (okay that took twenty seconds, is how rampant these sentences are in the novel): "Norman Mushari killed the afternoon by driving over to Newport, paid a quarter to tour the famous Rumford mansion."

Am I the only person who reads in such a sentence a downright scorn for the English language? There's like this gross boredom with the actions of the character, as though whatever motivations or mental processes that linked all causal events in the novel were of no concern. One can postmodernly argue these are all myths, but while Vonnegut gets lumped in with the postmodernists he's not that kind of postmodernist. I don't recall this construction in his other novels, but I wasn't as sensitive to syntax I was then, was instead a reader for story.

Man, even typing one out feels like rubbing someone else's feces into my keyboard.