Kurt Vonnegut: Provocative, harrowing and funny to the end
Posted by Karen R. Long April 12, 2007 15:42PM

Karen R. Long
Plain Dealer Book Editor

When Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night in Manhattan, he had a drawing ready, a simple doodle really, of a bird cage standing empty, its door flung open.

Underneath the image is a simple "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007," the only post Thursday on the writer's official Web site. His quick sketch amounted to the perfect exit line -- accessible, playful, a hint of giving death the slip.

Like some of Vonnegut's writing, in fact. The topic of mortality supplied Vonnegut with endless lines -- from his jokes about having the bad taste to live until he was 84 to his famous refrain whenever a character dies in "Slaughterhouse-Five":

"So it goes."

That funny, harrowing book, published in 1969, quickly became an anti-establishment coda on the absurdities and horrors of war. Vonnegut took his acrid memories of surviving the 1945 Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, as a prisoner of war, and turned them into a semi-autobiographical riff, a science-fiction-fueled work of art.

"Slaughterhouse-Five" entered the canon, a paperback wedged into the back pockets of millions of students into the 1970s. Modern Library ranks it 18th on its list of the hundred best novels of 20th-century American literature.

"He's the closest thing we've had to Voltaire," the writer Tom Wolfe told the Associated Press Thursday. "It's a sad day for the literary world."

Some critics have found Vonnegut's books repetitive, glib and a little forced, especially his more recent work. And while he is taught less widely than he was 30 years ago, there are signs that a new generation of students may be discovering him.

Creative-writing students at Ohio State University lit up their laptops with cyberspace messages Thursday, volleying their favorite Vonnegut quotations. And the author's appearances on campus last year and at Severance Hall in Cleveland in 2004 quickly sold out.

"He's a figure who still speaks to ordinary people," observed Dan Chaon, an Oberlin College English professor. "He was such a towering figure in the '70s that I think it was inevitable that his reputation took a dip for a while."

Nevertheless, Chaon said, Vonnegut's influence can be seen in the writing of John Irving, his student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in the work of a new generation like George Saunders and David Foster Wallace.

Ever provocative, Vonnegut told his Ohio State listeners: "If you really want to disappoint your parents, and don't have the nerve to be gay, go into the arts."

[. . .]