Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007)

I won't go on about how much Kurt Vonnegut has meant to me, my parents, my friends, popular culture, anti war movements and anyone who actively tries to remain sane on a daily basis. I hope this review of the last book I read of his will demonstrate everything that was wonderful and uncanny about the man and his work. In a way it is commemorative. So it goes...

Slapstick is an extremely aptly named novel since here we see Vonnegut having the time of his life. What could be more fun than to get a pair of twins, brother and sister, monstrosities at birth, who speak to no one but each other till they are separated at age 18, place them in an insane intellectual and incestuous relationship with each other and let it simmer for about 300 pages? The story is narrated by the brother, Wilbur, King of Manhattan and the last President of the United States, which lies in shambles ever since gravity started going wonky. Vonnegut skips back and forth between Wilbur and Eliza's wonderfully tortured and idiosyncratic childhood and the apocalyptic landscape of Wilbur's present day reality. Only Vonnegut can make apocalypse seem like a pretty good option in light of the state of things as they are. The story is everything that a Vonnegut novel always is: hysterically funny, incredibly smart and heartbreakingly true. He attacks everything from family values to our ongoing lack of respect towards our environment, the book is an onslaught. But as with every Vonnegut novel the soul of the book lies not in the plot or in the moral but in the tiny little quips with which Vonnegut peppers his novels, the little phrases he keeps repeating until they have the collected impact of an atom bomb. "So it goes" said Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse 5 over and over again until your guts were on the verge of bursting, "Hi ho" says Wilbur King of Manhattan until the slapstick of our known universe is a ball of outrage at the back of your throat. Hi ho indeed. Rest in peace.