Alexandra Kleeman: Philip K. Dick’s “gnostic logic” and other influences on You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

You Too Can Have a
Body Like Mine by
Alexandra Kleeman
(Harper, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry continues today with a contribution from Alexandra Kleeman, whose just-published debut novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, a seriocomic foray into consumerism and a uniquely contemporary kind of anomie, is drawing comparisons to DeLillo and Pynchon and, in the words of a Slate reviewer, “may be our best novel about the weirdness of being female in a culture that is obsessed with women’s bodies.” Below, Kleeman shares some of her formative influences as a writer.

VALIS, Philip K. Dick. People often think of Dick as a bad writer with an amazing set of concepts he’s trying to convey, but it’s not until you try to perform a Dickian act of narrative inversion or reality-shifting that you see how much skill and craft goes into what can look superficially like clunky writing. VALIS aims to make the reader perceive distinct entities as existentially or spiritually unitary—beneath surface differences lies a gnostic equivalence. Hence VALIS’s unfortunately-named protagonist Horselover Fat (an etymological equivalent for Philip K. Dick’s own name) can have a friend named Phil Dick, and later discover that he and Phil Dick are one and the same person. It would be easier (though still somewhat impossible) to tell this story from the outside, narrating and explaining this discovery. But Dick embeds you in Horselover Fat’s consciousness, forcing you to experience the contradictions of this gnostic logic as a visceral assault on your own individuality. It’s one of the strangest and most mysterious books out there, and I think it’s more radical in its structure than Pynchon or DeLillo because Dick allows not just inconsistencies but full-blown paradoxes to crop up in his world. The reader becomes a site for the resolution of these unresolvables, the effect often being that you find yourself thinking an impossible thing that you’ve never thought before, or experiencing something that feels like it could tear you in half.

Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth. This book takes the form a series of direct-address poems written on [the fast-food restaurant] Wendy’s comment cards—a uniquely modern constraint on composition if there ever was one. Shifting between exhortation, reflection, abuse, Wenderoth did a sort of postmodern take on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”—you could call it “500 Ways That Wendy’s Looks Back at You.” Lines like “People eating toward eternity! People looking nice toward eternity! It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” abut vivid descriptions of ground meat and factory farming. Wenderoth challenges the idea that the American lyric voice died with the obsolesce of the circumstances and landscapes that gave birth to it originally: in his poems there are pathos, tenderness, rage, and above all 100% real emotion, not from concentrate. I first read these when I was eighteen, and they rooted in me a belief that the unexceptional suburban places that surrounded me were not boring and sterile even though they were built to be—there was ample emotion, only that emotion was made wilder and stranger because it couldn’t find a place to settle itself.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers. A slew of books and movies out there aim to represent the transitional point at which the world stops engaging with you as a girl and begins engaging you, whether you like it or not, as a woman. None of them do it as well as Carson McCullers does. Frankie Addams is a twelve-year-old tomboy who “wishes that people could change back and forth from boys to girls”—we follow her over the course of a few days as she fantasizes about leaving town with her brother and his new bride, who are due to get married and then go on a honeymoon. By the end of the book, she’s narrowly escaped a disturbing encounter with a soldier and has learned what the reader knew all along: Her life is fixed insofar as her gender is fixed. She’ll learn to navigate the world with her newly sexualized body, she’ll learn unpleasant lessons about other people, she’ll age and if she does leave town it’s likely to be through a conventional, gendered channel rather than the escape she had imagined with her brother and his new wife, in a role she had dreamed up herself. This is a dark book, but funny, and true to a form of becoming a woman that I’ve known myself.

Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
(Delacorte Press, 1973)

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is a good prescription for anyone who’s suffering from loneliness or sadness, which is why I read him in high school and why I consider him something like a personal friend to this day, even though obviously we never met. What he does so well in this book is depict people who are alone in their loneliness, together. Dwayne Hoover is a successful car salesman who’s on the brink of going insane and just looking for the right idea to fixate upon, Kilgore Trout is a published but more or less ignored author with a fictional premise that will end up driving Hoover mad. Threaded through their story are victims of racism and injustice, syphilitic microbes, cows and the hamburgers they are made into. From the perspective of narrator or reader, the sadness of each of these individual characters becomes visible as a sad but sympathetic web that connects us all invisibly. Even if the problems are terrible and unresolved, Vonnegut gives you a taste of what it’s like to empathize not just with individual others, but for the whole painful system.

Empathy, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. This is the poetry that I open up whenever I want to feel calmer and wiser, or like I am with a calm wise friend whose emotions absorb me while allowing me to be myself, separate. These are intricately detailed etchings of an internal landscape, or a seismograph registering the peak and fall of one single emotional thread. Everything in them is an analogue for feeling, or every feeling in them is an analogue for unadulterated space and air and light. I love this book too much.

Though relations with oneself and with other people seem negotiated in terms secretly confirmed

by representation, her idea of the person’s visibility was not susceptible to representation. No matter

how emphatically a person will control his demeanor, there will be perspectives she cannot foresee or

direct, because there is no assignable end to the depth of us to which representation can reach,

the way part of a circle can be just the memory of a depth. The surface inside its contour,

like the inside of a body emits more feeling than its surroundings, as if

the volume or capacity of relations would only refer to something inside, that I can’t see,

that the other person and I keep getting in the way of, or things in the landscape while they are driving,

instead of the capacity being of your person. The volume of a bright cottonwood could be almost

a lack of volume or lack of space inside the tree, the way a membrane is the entrance of an organism.

—from “Honeymoon”

Alexandra Kleeman’s fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, Conjunctions, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among others, while her nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Vogue has praised You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine as “Fight Club for girls,” while the Chicago Tribune called it “a satirical and searing critique of modern-day womanhood.”

Previously in this series:
“Influences” posts by Jabari Asim, Deborah Baker, Kate Christensen, Jennifer Gilmore, Lauren Groff, Lev Grossman, Jane Hirschfield, Alan Heathcock, Amitava Kumar, Adam Levin, Annie Liontas, Dawn McGuire, Dinaw Mengestu, Jim Moore, Manuel Muñoz, Maggie Nelson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Arthur Phillips, Carl Phillips, Karen Russell, Timothy Schaffert, Philip Schultz, Mark Statman, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Ellen Ullman, and Adam Wilson

Dan Wakefield on Kurt Vonnegut: “If anything he was a counter-counter-culture hero”

The Library of America has just published Kurt Vonnegut: Novels 1976–1985, the third volume of the definitive edition of Vonnegut’s fiction. We recently interviewed his longtime friend, the novelist and journalist Dan Wakefield (Going All the Way, Starting Over), who  recently edited and wrote the introductions for If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young (a selection of Vonnegut’s speeches published by Seven Stories Press) and Kurt Vonnegut: Letters (Random House).

How did you come to be friends with Kurt Vonnegut?

I went to the same high school in Indianapolis as Kurt Vonnegut, ten years after he graduated. We both wrote for our high school paper, The Shortridge Daily Echo, and the year after I graduated in 1950, Vonnegut’s short stories began to be published in Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and other popular weekly magazines of the era. I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on, and met him in 1963 at the home of a mutual friend when he was living on Cape Cod and I was on a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard. He was friendly, open, and funny, and we had a great time—not talking about writing, but about high school. Our special bond was that we both confessed to being failures in high school sports!

Vonnegut reviewed my first novel, Going All The Way, for Life Magazine, and his words were instrumental in making the book a best seller. I always think of him as “The Godfather” of my work.

During the period 1976–1985, what was Kurt like when he was writing Slapstick, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Galápagos?

During that period I had lunch with Kurt whenever I went to New York, and it was always an entertaining occasion. Earlier, in the years of early struggle and rejections, when Kurt was living on The Cape and helping to raise his family of three children and three of his sister’s orphaned sons, he had had few occasions to meet and socialize with other writers. Now that he had the chance, he really enjoyed being involved in the PEN Club in New York and helping writers in other countries, being a part of The National Academy of Arts and Letters, and getting to know and socialize with his peers.

At lunch we talked about mutual writer friends, like Richard Yates, and our hometown of Indianapolis, and he often suggested after lunch we go back to his house and make phone calls to people we knew in common. He loved calling information in different cities and tracking down people he had known in the past, just for the fun he had in re-connecting. He also enjoyed showing his support to writer friends and former students, cheering them on. He was one of the most loyal friends I ever had.

What is your favorite of these later novels?

I have always especially loved Jailbird. There is a first-person, essay-like opening in which Kurt tells of meeting an Indianapolis man who became a well-known labor organizer and activist named Powers Hapgood. Hapgood had been arrested and jailed for picketing and leading strikes and the Judge asked him why a man from such a distinguished Indianapolis family would engage in such activities.

“Why?” said Hapgood. . . . “Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir.”

Vonnegut cites The Sermon on the Mount throughout his work, and in his sermon “Palm Sunday,” given to St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York City in 1980, he said “I am enchanted by the Sermon on the Mount. Being merciful, it seems to me, is the only good idea we have received so far. Perhaps we will get another idea that good by and by—and then we will have two good ideas.”

Mercy, in fact, is the basic theme of all Kurt Vonnegut’s work.

Why do you think Vonnegut’s work has always appealed to young people?

Kurt always had a fresh way of looking at things, a way to make great issues accessible, and to point out phoniness and pretentiousness wherever he saw it, no matter how sacred the cow. He was the “truth teller,” the person who points out the elephant in the room. He said the truth was shocking because we so rarely hear it. Even before Slaughterhouse-Five made him famous, I used to see college students in Boston carrying around dog-eared paperback copies of Cat’s Cradle, a satire about an invented religion whose fake dogma was expressed in rhyming couplets.

He has sometimes been dismissed as a hero to the counterculture but if anything he was a counter-counter-culture hero.” He dismissed the pop guru to the stars, Maharishi Mahesh Yoga, in the article “Yes, We Have No Nirvanas.” When Zen meditation was all the rage, he said we have a system in the West that also slows the heart rate and clears the mind—it’s called “reading short stories.” He called reading short stories “Buddhist Catnaps.”

What was his favorite anecdote?

He was honorary president of the American Humanist Association (he came from a long line of German freethinkers) and he loved to tell how he “slipped” while giving a eulogy of Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer who was former president of The Humanist Association. “I said I was sure that Isaac was up in heaven now. That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of Humanists. I rolled them in the aisles!”

He loved to tell that story—I heard it more than once!

Liesl Schillinger on E. L. Doctorow’s chronicles of the American century

Liesl Schillinger with E. L. Doctorow
at the New York Writers Hall of Fame gala
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Liesl Schillinger’s tribute to E. L. Doctorow. Schillinger is a journalist, literary critic, and translator based in New York. Her translation of the novel Every Day, Every Hour, by Nataša Dragnić, was published in May by Viking.

Before I begin speaking about the man I’m here to induct tonight into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame—the matchless E. L. Doctorow—I would like to piggyback on the marvelous anecdotes that Sidney Offit just now gave us about his best friend, the late writer Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut came from Indiana, and so do I. My high school in West Lafayette offered a course on Vonnegut—so proud were they of his Hoosier roots—and I took that course when I was 12. Fifteen years later, by which time I was living in New York and working at The New Yorker, I met Vonnegut at a book party in the Hamptons for Erica Jong’s Fear of Fifty. He was standing by the pool, away from the rest of the guests, smoking. I went up to him, reverently and a little fearfully, hoping he would let me stand next to him and smoke a companionable cigarette. He did. I told him I was afraid to tell him that I, too, was a Hoosier; because I knew from his book Cat’s Cradle how he hated it when people exaggerated the coincidence of mass affiliations—like being “Hoosiers,” or Cubs fans. (He had nicknamed such fake groups in Cat’s Cradle: “granfalloons.”) Looking not at me, but up into the sky, he mournfully said, “We are all lost animals, looking for a herd.” Looking around this room: seeing the great E. L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison and Pete Hamill, along with scores of people who have come here to celebrate these remarkable authors, and who uphold the continuing importance of the written word, I’m now thinking: this is my herd.

An interview with Sidney Offit about his friend, the “congenial and modest” Kurt Vonnegut

Sidney Offit spoke with us about the recent publication of Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950–1962, which he edited for The Library of America.

Why do you think Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and stories still strike a chord today?
Kurt considers the seminal conflicts of war, justice, love, space, time, and “what’s it all about”? And he writes with an accessible style spiced by originality and wit.

What can younger writers learn from his work?
Write what you believe and remember, “You are writing for strangers.”

You often took walks together. What were they like?
Walks with Kurt were always an adventure. We shared intimacies and observations, and he taught me to look up and appreciate buildings as well as the sky. Whenever I stroll pass Tiffany on the south side of 57th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, I remember the first time Kurt discovered that the building directly east of Tiffany was once Public School 6453.

How was his tennis game?
Win or lose Kurt enjoyed tennis. Once, when we were playing doubles with our sons and off to a fast start 1-3, before they started to rally, Kurt suggested, “Let’s fall on the ball and run out the clock.”

Did he change after he became a counterculture hero and famous? 
As far as I could tell, Kurt’s fame only increased his curiosity about other people and ways of life. I never met anyone who experienced Kurt as less than congenial and modest.

Did he ever speak about World War II and Dresden? 
We cut up and kicked it around about our experiences and feelings. But there was very little Kurt told me about the war that he didn’t express vividly and originally in his novels.

What do you think of Vonnegut’s short stories?  And his ambitions for the stories compared to the novels? Did he talk about the “slicks” he wrote for? Why do you think he stopped writing stories and began to write literary and nonfiction journalism instead? 
Kurt’s short stories are works of narrative and imaginative art. He was candid about why he stopped writing them and concentrated on writing novels. The “slicks” were no longer around and there was not a lucrative market for short stories. Remember—Kurt was supporting a family with seven children.

Do you have a favorite novel or story in the new LOA collection? 
Among the stories and novels, circa 1950–1962, it’s not easy for me to play at handicapping, but if I had to make a pick I’d plunk for “Harrison Bergeron” because it’s so wildly imaginative, an easy read, unpredictable—vintage Vonnegut that is not quite as available as the other novels and stories in the collection.

What do you miss most about him? 
His observations, his humor, his warmth, his friendship, his cigarette smoke.

Also of interest:

• The blog Letters of Note recently posted two letters by Vonnegut written when he was enjoying his first success as an author, earning “fat checks” from the “slicks”—glossy magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan.
• Previously on Reader’s Almanac: William Deresiewicz on The Sirens of Titan, when “Kurt Vonnegut has become Kurt Vonnegut”
• Read our previous interview with Sidney Offit (PDF)

William Deresiewicz on The Sirens of Titan, when “Kurt Vonnegut has become Kurt Vonnegut”

William Deresiewicz begins his review in The Nation of the LOA’s first two Kurt Vonnegut volumes with some apprehension:

Those old mass-market paperbacks you used to find him in, with their trippy covers and flaky pages, 50¢ used? They were part of the mystique. Now here he is, decked out in the publishing equivalent of black tie: appendices, chronology, annotations, textual notes and a page layout, as the Library of America boilerplate puts it, “designed for readability as well as elegance.” Elegance? There’s a story in the second volume called “The Big Space Fuck.” “I think I am the first writer to use ‘fuck’ in a title,” Vonnegut once boasted. . . . But never mind; the words cast their spell [and] the layout is forgotten. . . . Some of them are worse than I remembered, but some of them are even better.

“With its idled masses made superfluous by technologically driven gains in productivity,” Player Piano’s “prescience is chilling,” according to Deresiewicz, yet he finds Vonnegut’s first novel “apprentice work—clunky, clumsy, overstuffed.” His reaction to the second novel is decidedly different:

Turn the page to The Sirens of Titan (1959), however, and it’s all there, all at once. Kurt Vonnegut has become Kurt Vonnegut. The spareness hits you first. The first page contains fourteen paragraphs, none of them longer than two sentences, some of them as short as five words. It’s like he’s placing pieces on a game board—so, and so, and so. The story moves from one intensely spotlit moment to the next, one idea to the next, without delay or filler. The prose is equally efficient, with a scalding syncopated wit: “‘I told her that you and she were to be married on Mars.’ He shrugged. ‘Not married exactly—’ he said, ‘but bred by the Martians—like farm animals.’”

. . . With a decade writing stories for the slicks under his belt (Colliers, Cosmopolitan, The Saturday Evening Post), Vonnegut knew about pushing an audience’s buttons. Later, when he taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he won his students’ reluctant allegiance by eschewing aesthetic pieties and teaching them how to grab a reader’s attention. People want illusions, The Sirens of Titan insists, and they are abjectly grateful to anyone who can offer them. [The protagonist Malachi] Constant is trapped on Mercury with another man, Boaz. Each knows something about the other that the other doesn’t know about himself. “Don’t truth me,” Boaz pleads with him, “and I won’t truth you.”

Fortune makes for satire, the vanity of human wishes. What elevates the novel to tragedy is the fact that Constant isn’t guiltless. The truth Boaz withholds is something dreadful that the other man has done: unwillingly, unwittingly, but done nonetheless. This is high Greek stuff. Our moral beings are not ours to rule, yet we are accountable for them all the same. Tragedy means that, in the end, you do not question what’s become of you, because you know that you deserve it. . . . The novel is punctuated by moments of piercing loss. At the last, like all true tragedy, it leaves us drained and humbled. . . . Later, Vonnegut would justly be accused of sentimentality. Here the emotion is earned. In this, his second novel and his second-greatest, he achieves a sublimity he would never attempt again.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Sidney Offit and David Kipen on what makes Kurt Vonnegut’s style “unmistakably his alone” 
• Kurt Vonnegut, Armistice Day, and Veterans Day 
• Sidney Offit shares memories of his friendship with Kurt Vonnegut 

Related LOA works: Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950–1962 (includes The Sirens of Titan); Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

Sidney Offit and David Kipen on what makes Kurt Vonnegut’s style “unmistakably his alone”

Writers seem to delight in trying to identify the defining components of Kurt Vonnegut’s distinctive voice. His best friend Sidney Offit, in an interview last year with The Library of America, offered the following assessment:

There’s a quality to his style that is suggestive of quips, gag writing. He once said to me there was one thing he always tried to have in a book: there should be a smile on every page. . . . 

Hemingway had an innovative style—the way he used the conjunction ”and” brought grace to the story. But I never met anyone who talked or acted like his characters. The difference is that you could imitate Hemingway’s style and still create something original. You just understate. But you can’t imitate Vonnegut without it seeming derivative or a parody. The best definition of Kurt’s style was John Leonard’s tribute at Kurt’s eightieth birthday party: “Vonnegut, like Abe Lincoln and Mark Twain, is always being funny when he’s not being depressed. His is a weird jujitsu that throws us for a loop.”

In “Unhappy Camper,” an essay this month in Humanities, David Kipen reviews Kurt Vonnegut’s life and career and concludes with an entertaining run at deconstructing Vonnegut’s style:

Yet no one book defines a writer—especially a dyspeptic writer—as much as his style. Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night may surpass Vonnegut’s other books, as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn all but dwarfs the rest of Twain, but it’s the timbre of an author’s idling voice that we ultimately know him by. Bierce’s ferocious, hypodermic sting, Mencken’s fulminating mock-heroic bombast: These are their fingerprints. It may be worth a few late words here to try to tissue-type what makes a Vonnegut sentence or paragraph unmistakably his alone. 

For one thing, of course, a Vonnegut sentence sometimes is a Vonnegut paragraph. Vonnegut didn’t let his nights pasting up the Cornell Daily Sun torpedo a semi-promising academic career without first learning a thing or two about the benefits of shrewdly apportioned white space. His most frequent use of it, the four-word koan “And so it goes” warrants attention on a couple of fronts. Superficially, it’s an affront to every grammar rulebook that ever misinformed impressionable minds about how not to begin a sentence. Less conspicuously, though, it also scans as poetry—iambic dimeter, to be finicky about it, with an internal rhyme thrown in for lagniappe. 

Vonnegut’s poetic rhythms serve as a clue to another cornerstone of his style: It’s written for the ear, and meant to be heard. The very first sentence of the new collection [Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973], “Call me Jonah,” from Cat’s Cradle, is an imperative, as is the first paragraph of the second chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, which introduces the whole Billy Pilgrim thread of the story with the single word “Listen.” At least one chapter of Breakfast of Champions begins with the same word, and it recurs with incantatory frequency throughout the Vonnegut corpus. Like any command, it implies both the first and second person, the two most direct spoken voices possible. Vonnegut is talking straight to us, one thing that’s helped endear him to generations of young readers. He also confirms their earliest suspicions that they’re being regularly lied to. 

Indispensable to Vonnegut’s humane comedy is this informal sense of reader rapport. The first sentence of Slaughterhouse-Five uses the phrase “more or less,” the second, “pretty much.” Before the paragraph is out, we’ll see “And so on.” Precision matters less to Vonnegut than commiseration, the feeling that we’re all in this together and nobody finishes on top, and therefore that sweating every last adverb may not really be for him.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Kurt Vonnegut on “the only thing you can teach” writers
• Sidney Offit shares memories of his friendship with Kurt Vonnegut
• Kurt Vonnegut, Armistice Day, and Veterans Day

Related LOA volumes: Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

Liesl Schillinger on what to reread this summer and why

Guest blog post by Liesl Schillinger, New York-based writer, literary critic, and creator of the whimsical neologisms blog wordbirds

I’m about to go on my first true vacation this year, to an island in the middle of a lake where there’s no Internet and no electricity. In the daytime, our light comes from the sun; at nightfall, from oil lanterns whose glow extends halfway across our birch-bough beds. As a literary critic, I read at all times; but on holiday, I indulge in the pleasure of rereading. And since the Adirondacks (where I’ll be) are steeped in this country’s mythic past, I’ll be bringing American authors with me to reread. Here are the ones I’ll be dipping into, while the light lasts:

Edith Wharton. When I first read Wharton’s The House of Mirth, at 16, I loved this book and rued Lily Bart’s cruel fate. Reading it decades later, I was struck instead by the cruelty of Wharton’s social world and by her heroine’s bottomless venality. Wharton’s Collected Stories tend to be breezier and better-humored than her longer work (though still a little wicked), and I’ll be diving back into them—particularly “Charm Incorporated,” a story about a businessman who marries a beguiling immigrant whom the reader imagines to be a gold-digger, but who in fact rescues her husband’s fortunes.

John Dos Passos. What Carl Sandburg did with poetry for Chicago, Dos Passos did with prose for New York. In his tour de force, Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos wrote with striking, cinematic visual imagery, using dialogue (mostly) to convey a living, breathing portrait of Manhattan in the first two decades of the last century. Though Dos Passos includes the wealthy among his characters, he gives unusual voice to working American men, women and immigrants. Like Sandburg, who defended ordinary citizens in his long cycle, The People, Yes, Dos Passos championed the working man, and he ought to be more forcefully championed by those who admire Hemingway, Steinbeck and the modern novel.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many people reread The Great Gatsby. But the Fitzgerald novel that haunts me is Tender Is the Night, in which he transmits love’s poignancy more evocatively than just about anyone else. And his passage about Nicole’s Paris shopping trip is my favorite run-on sentence of all time: “For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve . . .” Best read when one is far from toil . . . say, on a dock in the afternoon, as the first gin and tonics come around.

Kurt Vonnegut. Growing up in Indiana (Vonnegut’s home state), I got to take an eccentric class in high school devoted to Vonnegut’s oeuvre—taught by a wry, obese teacher who resembled (I thought) Vonnegut’s portly “Mr. Rosewater.” I must have read Cat's Cradle—Vonnegut’s parable of connection and empathy in the age of mass destruction—five times. I have also reread Slaughterhouse-Five, his stories Welcome to the Monkey House, and even his wacky, cartoon-filled Breakfast of Champions. His books are mosaics studded with fertile, glinting thoughts and images, always worth poring over again, always producing a fresh impression.

Anne Tyler. I consider some of the novels Anne Tyler wrote in the 1970s and 1980s to be American classics: Searching for Caleb, The Accidental Tourist, and, my favorite, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (about a dysfunctional family, before that term came into wide use). Understated humor runs through her books like a stream among the rushes: in one novel, a woman drives a car that’s missing a door; after she parks it, another character rips an ad from a magazine and tapes it to the frame: "Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have a Buick?" Later, she pops a piece of candy into her mouth from a bowl on a coffee table, only to realize it’s made of glass. This is American vision, American nuance, told in American language. And even Tyler’s sharpest observations have a generous, merciful quality to them, elevating her writing above satire or tale-telling.

John Updike. Rabbit runs, Rabbit gets reduxed, and Rabbit is reread; but the Updike novel I’m drawn to over and over is his stately retelling of the American century through the multi-generational saga In the Beauty of the Lilies. Written in 1996, this book begins in the rural, decent small-town America we associate with Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart, and progresses relentlessly but organically to the media-oversaturated 90s, by which time an uncentered population has lost its context, and a neglected boy (who is nonetheless somebody’s son) joins a Waco-like cult, and shakes off its spell too late. The confident breadth of Updike’s span inspires awe. It’s an ideal book to wrap up at sunset . . . before returning for reassurance and warmth to the companionship of friends and family around the campfire.

Also of interest:

• The Guardian helps you plan your summer "greatest non-fiction" reading, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• After a vacation a few years ago Liesl Schillinger compiled a musical playlist inspired by her reading
• Listen to Carl Sandburg read “The people, yes, the people”

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, and Other Writings; John Dos Passos: Novels 1920-1925; Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems; Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

Kurt Vonnegut on “the only thing you can teach” writers

In his Library of America interview about Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973 volume editor and best friend Sidney Offit shared some of the tips he and Vonnegut swapped as fellow creative writing teachers:

Kurt understood the short story and the structure. He once did a chart for me. He said the only thing you can teach is development. A story has to have a development and change. And that is right on the mark. I’ve taught much more than he had in terms of years and schools—at NYU, Hunter, the New School. And I have to tell you: the gift for narrative, for storytelling, is rarer than the gift for poetic prose or elegant language—it isn’t even close. The students I have had over the years who could write stories were eventually published. . .

In his many popular talks on storytelling, Vonnegut frequently used a chalkboard to draw the chart Offit refers to. There’s a YouTube clip of the beginning of one of these talks (see below). An essay in A Man Without a Country called “Here is a lesson in creative writing” offers a longer version that moves from the Cinderella story to explore the contrasting structures of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Hamlet. Vonnegut ends by pondering the strange similarities of fairy tales and tragedies:

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die—God forbid—I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, “Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?”

Lapham’s Quarterly has posted most of this essay—with Vonnegut's drawings—but leaves out an opening paragraph that seems particularly appropriate for graduation season:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Watch Kurt Vonnegut discuss “the shapes of stories”:



Also of interest:

• Read the entire LOA interview with Sidney Offit about Kurt Vonnegut
• A montage (YouTube) of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules for writing a short story
• Bloggers Austin Kleon and Derek Sivers offer variations on Vonnegut’s graphs
• Sidney Offit shares memories of his friendship with Kurt Vonnegut, a previous Reader's Almanac post

Related LOA work: Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

Sidney Offit shares memories of his friendship with Kurt Vonnegut

This month’s Library of America interview celebrates a beautiful friendship. Sidney Offit, editor of Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973, first met the author in the early 1970s, shortly after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. It was a time, Offit reports, “when there were two writers who young people seemed to read as scripture: Kurt was one, Herman Hesse was the other.”

Both aging amateur athletes in their forties, Vonnegut and Offit discovered they shared an enthusiasm for chasing tennis balls, and pursuing other adventures together. In a 1979 article about William Buckley, Vonnegut lists pages of names of his “New York friendships” (“a friendship with a person you have met at least once”)—only Sidney’s is crowned with “(best friend!).” In the LOA interview Offit shares many memories of their times together:

LOA: Vonnegut uses tennis as part of Rosewater’s therapy in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. In your memoir you note that the historian James Flexner, one of your tennis six, viewed each player’s style as indicative of the player’s ego and character. Of Vonnegut he said, “his service is modest and he seems less interested in winning than just having fun and not embarrassing himself.” What did you learn about Kurt by playing tennis with him all those years?

Offit: Jimmie got it right. Kurt was all about fun. He’d get off some great lines. We were playing tennis once with our sons. We won the first two games. But then they were coming back strong. Suddenly, Kurt said to me: “Hey, let’s fall on the ball and run out the clock.”

LOA: Can you share some of your adventures with Kurt?

Offit: In the seventies a German filmmaker who had learned from Kurt about our Ping-Pong matches was determined to shoot us in action at the Broadway parlor where we boarded our paddles. A day or so before the filming Kurt and I decided to warm up. We arrived some time mid-afternoon and were greeted by the manager who had a way of looking at us as if we were visiting a speakeasy. “Ah, yeah, Kurt and Sid,” he said. “Table one.” At the time Kurt’s name was world famous but even some of his ardent fans didn’t recognize him. On the other hand, I was appearing on a local TV news show on Channel 5 three or four times a week, debating politics. Viewers may not always recall my politics but my face seemed to be familiar to perhaps as many as a half million New Yorkers.

Well, Kurt had invented this game of 100. “The hardest part of us ole guys playing Ping-Pong,” Kurt said, “was picking up the ball.” We were banging away—perhaps 86–82—when our ball flew over to where some kids were playing. This young guy brings the ball over and looks at me. “Say,” he says, “aren’t you the professor on television?” Kurt got a kick out of that. “Yes,” I replied. “What are you doing here?” he wanted to know. “I’m playing Ping-Pong with Kurt Vonnegut.” You could see the boy’s eyes light up. He ran over to tell his friends. “Guys, guys, that’s Kurt Vonnegut.” Then he came back with our ball. “Mr. Vonnegut,” he asked, “would you autograph this ball for us?” Of course, Kurt wouldn’t let me live down that I was the one who got recognized. “So you’re my famous friend.”

Read the entire LOA interview. (PDF)

Watch a video clip (YouTube) of Vonnegut and Offit playing a spirited game of Ping-Pong:



Also of interest:

• Kurt Vonnegut, Armistice Day, and Veterans Day, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• Watch the entire 1983 BBC Arena documentary about Vonnegut at The Slayer
• The May Library of America e-Newsletter features Kurt Vonnegut and Willian Dean Howells, two perceptive chroniclers of a changing America, a century apart

Related LOA works: Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963–1973

Kurt Vonnegut, Armistice Day, and Veterans Day

Bohica’s post earlier this week on Daily Kos cites the Veterans for Peace Armistice Day Message and recalls the shift in focus that occurred in 1954, when Armistice Day was changed to Veterans Day. Veterans for Peace quotes Kurt Vonnegut’s preface to Breakfast of Champions when Philboyd Studge travels “in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.”

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. 

Vonnegut was indeed born on November 11, 1922, and served as an infantry battalion scout in World War II. Captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, he became an eyewitness, as a prisoner of war, to the Allied bombing of Dresden, as he described in a Paris Review interview:

. . . a siren went off—it was February 13, 1945—and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.

The Germans called the building that housed the POWs Schlachthof Funf (Slaughterhouse Five) and that gave Vonnegut the title of his best-known, bestselling novel. However, as Elizabeth Abele notes in her essay “The Journey Home in World War II Novels,” Vonnegut was working through his wartime experiences in all his writing in the 1960s:

It actually took Vonnegut four sequential and interconnected novels to express his personal response to the violent reality of World War II—Mother Night (1962), Cat’s Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), and finally Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). . . Their focus is on the unintentional results of war: not only the killings of civilians but, just as importantly, the aftereffects that follow the veteran home; the particular manner in which those left behind are nonetheless infected by war.

The “looping” element in Vonnegut’s writing, his altering of the flow of time, which some readers credit to his roots in science fiction, has been recognized by other war veterans as a technique that resonates with their experiences, as novelist Tim O’Brien explained in a 2005 interview with Zoe Trodd:

The looping aspect of my writing is important. To tell stories in a linear way would be deceitful. The trauma doesn’t end, it comes back in memory, returns and returns, often with a difficult take on the original event; horror, outrage, disbelief. War and trauma don’t end in a literal sense, they reverberate across time, and my repetitions are a way to get at this psychological truth.

Vonnegut’s personal war-narrative, as Abel details, “loops throughout his entire oeuvre, from Mother Night to A Man without a Country (2005).”

Of related interest: Colby Buzzell, “War in Reverse: Reading Vonnegut in Iraq”

Related LOA works: Poets of World War II; Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944-1946; The Library of America will be publishing its first Kurt Vonnegut volume in May 2011.