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Slapstick(Vonnegut)

Slapstick, first hardcover edition

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! is Vonnegut's eighth novel, published by Delacourt on October 1, 1976. It is dedicated to—and opens with a caricature by Al Hirschfeld of—Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy, better known as Laurel and Hardy, whom Vonnegut calls "two angels". The epigraph is Romeo's quote "Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd" from Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2. It was largely met with mixed to negative reviews and to some extent would later be dismissed by Vonnegut himself. It was adapted into the 1982 film Slapstick of Another Kind.

Much of the work is framed as the autobiographical writings of Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a former pediatrician who served as the final President of the United States. Now living in the lobby of the abandoned Empire State Building in a depopulated Manhattan with his daughter and her lover, he reflects on his relationship with his late twin, Eliza—with whom he could form a shared genius—and their plan to create artificial extended families, which Swain accomplished during his time in office.

Overview[]

Prologue[]

Laurel and Hardy

Laurel and Hardy, 1930s

Calling the novel a grotesque slapstick comedy and the closet he will come to writing an autobiography, Vonnegut states it's about what life, and all its many tests, "feels like" to him. It is important, he says, to bargain in good faith with destiny, like the comedians Laurel and Hardy, who tried their best with each test. Like them, Vonnegut's works involve very little love and more about "common decency", in which people attempt to treat each other well. Searching for love is foolish and often dangerous, unlike common decency. He also notes that he personally can't distinguish the love he has for people and for dogs.

Vonnegut's longest experience with common decency is with his scientist brother Bernard, both of whom belong to artificial extended families whose members can be found around the world—fellow writers and scientists. This is useful since humans need all the relatives they can get, not for love, but for common decency. As children, both had a biological extended family in Indianapolis, descended from free-thinking German immigrants. Members might wander the world, but always return home where there were relatives, family businesses, and property. However, the First World War and resultant American hatred of all things German caused these family bonds to decay and by the end of the Second World War, the youngest generation had begun to disperse, like Vonnegut and his brother. Indianapolis itself, which once had its own dialect and culture, is now just another interchangeable American city.[1]

The two still go back for funerals, such as for their Uncle Alex, who recently died childless at 87. He was co-founder of the local branch of Alcoholics Anonymous, although his obituary politely denied that he himself was an alcoholic to prevent tainting the rest of the family. It may have been as much loneliness as alcohol that prompted him into A.A., yet another artificial extended family. When Vonnegut was a child, Alex would tell him what books to read and take him to visit relatives he didn't know he had.

On the plane to the funeral, there was an empty seat between Vonnegut and Bernard, perhaps representing their sister Alice, the middle child who'd died of cancer many years ago at age 41, a death she'd once referred to as "slapstick". Her husband, James Adams—who was going to raise their four children—died a few days before her when his commuter train went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey. After their deaths, the three oldest sons held a meeting at which they declared their wish to remain together and keep their two dogs. They were raised by Vonnegut and his wife Jane, while the one year old baby was adopted by relatives in Alabama. The children are now adults and admit they cannot remember either of their parents. Memories often empty themselves to protect us from horror and grief. Vonnegut, however, remembered his sister for many years after her death, since she was the person for whom he always wrote. Most authors write for only one person, but now even she has begun to fade away. While flying to their uncle's funeral, Vonnegut daydreamed the story that would become this novel about "incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death", with he and his sister as monsters.[2]

Plot Summary[]

EmpireStateBuilding2019LobbyLookingWest

Fifth Avenue Lobby, Empire State Building

Former and final American President Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, one hundred years old and now living in the lobby of the abandoned Empire State Building, has begun writing his autobiography. He is also referred to as "The King of Candlesticks", since he owns over a thousand, but has no candles. Earth's gravity has become variable and unpredictable. Manhattan is now know as the Island of Death, with the bridges and tunnels to the mainland destroyed so outsiders can avoid exposure to "The Green Death", a plague which killed most of its inhabitants. Wilbur, who instead calls it "Skyscraper National Park", lives with his granddaughter, Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald and her lover, Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen, both illiterate youths who are uninterested in history.

Their nearest neighbor, one and half kilometers away in Turtle Bay, is Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, a farmer, miller, and distiller with numerous well-treated slaves.[3] The three of them are planning an ornate party for Wilbur's one hundred and first birthday in a month, at which he hopes he won't drink too much. Melody and Isadore are building a pyramid at Broadway and 42nd Street, over the body of a stillborn male contained in a former humidor: Melody's offspring, the result of a rape on her way to the island. She is pregnant again by Isadore, whose family, the Raspberries, are food-gathers known for eating anything.[4] It was, in fact, the Raspberries who accidentally discovered the antidote to The Green Death by eating fish without cleaning them and that something, "probably pollution left over from olden times", remained in their systems which prevents death. Any trouble makers on the island are simply denied access to the antidote.[5]

He recounts that he was born Wilbur Rockefeller Swain with a dizygotic female twin, Eliza Mellon Swain, the children of Caleb Mellon Swain and Letitia Vanderbilt Swain, née Rockefeller, both of whom were descended from great inherited wealth. The twins were "neanderthaloids", assumed to be mentally disabled and not expected to live to adulthood. Their parents were advised to place them in a family property built by their ancestor, Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain, in Galen, Vermont. The house was modified for their needs and they hired a local staff of live-in cleaners, practical nurses, and a cook, along with Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott to oversee their health. Their parents would visit once a year on their birthday. Unbeknownst to the others, the house contained trap doors, sliding panels, peepholes, and secret passageways and tunnels later discovered by the twins. Despite their assumed idiocy, they were in fact extremely intelligent when they were together, mastering several languages as well as calculus by age seven, and had read all the books in the library by age ten, as well as both growing to over two meters tall. However, they continued acting incapable around adults, subconsciously encouraged by the staff, who would otherwise lose their jobs and privileges.

The twins instead viewed their intelligence as another aspect of their freakishness, although it only manifested itself when they were together, and most strongly when they were in intimate physical contact. Wilbur, with the more methodical and experimental mind, was the one to actually learn to read and write, while Eliza remained illiterate but capable memorizing and making "the great intuitive leaping" of understanding, juxtaposing, and creating new ideas. Together they developed critiques of Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the United States Constitution—which failed to recognize that elected officials and the wealthy, like all humans, would come to see themselves as a separate, artificial extended family—as well as concluding from the great building projects of the past that Earth's gravity must have once been subject to more variation. To deal with the flaws of the Constitution, they devised a system whereby every citizen would be made a member of an artificial extended family. As they grew older, larger, and more deformed, the two agreed that it was better not to be physically attractive since they preferred their shared isolated world together.[6]

On the evening before their fifteenth birthday, Wilbur and Eliza, from a secret passageway, overheard their parents conversing blandly about how the Chinese were experimenting with shrinking people so that they consumed fewer resources. A month before, China had also sent two hundred people to Mars without a space vehicle, to the astonishment of those in the West. A snapping log in the fireplace caused their mother to have a brief mental fit, during which she loudly declared her hatred for her children and her wish that they would die. After calming down, she expressed hope for any small sign of intellect and humanness from either twin. Seeing this as simply a problem to be solved, the twins produced a large sign to hang in their parents' bedroom during the night, proclaiming they could be "as smart or as dumb" as anyone wanted them to be. The next morning the two dressed themselves and informed the staff that a "miracle has taken place overnight" and that they were now intelligent and refined people. When their father came down to see them at breakfast, he was horrified to realize that he and his wife would now be required to somehow love these new, terrifying human beings. Realizing their error, Wilbur and Eliza attempted to act like imbeciles again, which only made the situation worse.[7]

The two were then subjected to a number of physical and mental tests for which they were separated for the first time, making them "stupid and insecure". Their primary psychological tester was Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner, who was raised in poverty and whose immigrant Polish grandfather changed their family name from "Stankowitz" to "Swain". She exhibited hostility toward the twins due to their wealth, and forced them to do their testing separately, leading to poor results for them both, but especially the illiterate Eliza. They were observed by a servant and former soldier, Withers Witherspoon, for signs of telepathy, since clues leaking out from the People's Republic of China had suggested to Western science that such communication was possible, transmitted from healthy and clear sinus cavities. The Chinese utilized this to create collective minds far more intelligent than individuals. Wilbur and Eliza, however, could not use this ability when more than three meters apart. They demanded to be tested again together, with the eventual support of their mother, but in trying to perform as well as possible, they physically contorted themselves with their legs wrapped around each others' necks. Horrified, their parents decided to send Wilbur to "a school for severely disturbed children on Cape Cod." The night before he left, he and Eliza hid the writings of their various critiques and theories in an urn in Professor Swain's mausoleum.[8]

Harvard Medical School HDR

Harvard Medical School Quad

Wilbur did well at school as a "patient and orderly" student and was accepted to Harvard, already beginning to forget his sister, who had been institutionalized. Their father died during Wilbur's first year of medical school and he was named executor of the will. Eliza sued to regained her share of the family inheritance, represented by attorney Norman Mushari, Jr., who also had her released from the institution. She gave extensive television interviews from the privacy of a converted church confessional booth, stating she'd waited to be rescued by her brother, who never came. She remarked on the Chinese closing their American embassy. Their ambassador, who by this point was only sixty centimeters tall, stated nothing happening in the United States interested them anymore, although Eliza said it was no wonder, since Americans took such terrible care of their relatives. Wilbur had meanwhile become a bon-vivant in Boston. He and his mother did not challenge Eliza's claims, so she easily regained her share of the fortune. One day, she and Mushari visited her brother and mother, who retreated upstairs. A chain-smoker with an alcohol problem, Eliza first verbally attacked Wilbur before gently touching him, causing their single genius to reemerge. In the ensuing pandemonium, which lasted five days, the two held Mushari, their mother, and the household servants captive while Wilbur read every book in the house out loud to Eliza and they jointly wrote a work on pediatrics that, when it was released decades later, would become one of the best selling of all time—So You Went and Had a Baby.[9]

Afterward, the two were too terrified to be in close proximity again, so Eliza moved to Machu Picchu, where many rich people were fleeing to avoid social and economic declines in their homelands. At a party at the Ritz in Boston celebrating Wilbur's graduation at the bottom of his class at Harvard Medical School, he was led across the street to the Public Gardens by a seeming bellboy. Brought to a statue of a doctor holding a sleeping child, commemorating the first use of anesthetics in surgery in the United States, Eliza appeared in a helicopter and, through a bullhorn, quoted to him from Shakespeare's thirty-ninth sonnet. Wilbur declared his love for her, but she responded only with "God guide the hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain" and left. It was the last time they would talk with each other in life. Returning to his childhood home in Vermont, Wilbur opened a medical clinic and children's hospital and married a wealthy third cousin, Rose Aldrich Ford, with whom he had a son, Carter Paley Swain. She was unhappy and the two eventually divorced, with her moving to the same building as Eliza in Machu Picchu. His mother moved in with him, feeble and nearing death.

One night, a Chinese man the size of a human thumb appeared on Wilbur's mantelpiece. Calling himself a "roving ambassador" named Fu Manchu, he asked to see the papers Wilbur and Eliza had hid in Professor Swain's mausoleum. Eliza had told their childhood ideas to the Chinese and if any were found useful, they agreed to provide her with a trip to their Martian colony. On Wilbur's fiftieth birthday, he received a two week old card from Eliza saying she was going to China and a more recent one from Fu Manchu informing him that his sister had died in an avalanche on Mars. At that moment, gravity suddenly became heavy for the first time, creating chaos around the world. It is still uncertain if this was a natural event or caused by the Chinese after reading Wilbur and Eliza’s childhood theory. Returning home, Wilbur found in his mail samples of a new drug intended to treat symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome called tri-benzo-Deportamil. Taking two on a whim, Wilbur found himself "flooded with contentment and confidence" and asked his nurse to order two thousand more doses, beginning a thirty year addiction.[10]

1122-WAS-The White House

The White House

Inspired by his rediscovery of he and Eliza's youthful treatise on artificial extended families, Wilbur closed his practice and was elected as a Senator from Vermont and later President of the United States under the slogan "Lonesome No More!" His campaign proposal involved assigning all Americans new middle names with a proper noun and number between one and twenty. Those with the same middle name would be siblings, everyone with the same noun would be cousins. He married a second time to Sophie Rothschild Swain, nearly fifty years his junior. Gravity continued to be variable, but more gradually and smoothly. Natural resources had become so scarce that there was hardly enough energy to run computers to assign the new middle names. On the day he was given his new middle name, he learned that a White House dishwasher, Carlos Villavicencio, had also become a Daffodil-11, making them brothers. People began congregating outside the White House, claiming to be new relatives of the President and First Lady. There was a great deal of public opposition to the scheme and they came to constitute an artificial extended family of their own. This included his own wife, who divorced him and also moved to Machu Picchu.

Family directories were published and held at every State House, City Hall, police department, and public library. Family newspapers arose in which relatives sought investment capital, sold items through classifieds, reported the successes of family members, and warned against those who were morally bankrupt. Statistical anomalies occurred in the naming, such as Pachysandras having musical talent, and a large concentration of Daffodils in Indianapolis. As an unforeseen consequence, all people with the number 13 formed their own family identity. Meanwhile, the first appearance by the Chinese in a quarter of a century occurred when the widow of a physicist in Urbana, Illinois was visited. Also, a new religious movement, the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped, was founded in Chicago, soon to become "the most popular American religion of all time".[11]

Without warning, much of the nation was stricken with The Albanian Flu, except in Manhattan where The Green Death prevailed, killing millions. The country fell apart and while certain areas were subject to "claims of Dukedoms and Kingdoms", artificial families became the primary social unit. A night of heavy gravity destroyed Machu Picchu, killing the wealthy who had congregated there. Staff at the White House died of illness, leaving Villavicencio the only employee, and soon, two-thirds through Wilbur's second term, little attention was paid to the Federal Government. His supply of tri-benzo-Deportamil was nearly depleted and he began to suspect he'd die when it ran out.

One day, two strangers appeared at the White House, one dressed as a frontiersman, the other a military pilot in the United States Air Force. The former—Byron Hatfield, a member of "one of the few genuine extended families of blood relatives in the country"—brought a letter from the physicist's widow in Urbana, Wilma Pachysandra-17 von Peterswald. Her husband, Dr. Felix Bauxite-13 von Peterswald, discovered a way to communicate with the dead. Somehow the Chinese learned about this but found it uninteresting, especially since the afterlife seemed to consist of nothing but boredom. The widow had been in communication with Eliza, who told her it was important that she speak with her brother Wilbur. The other stranger, Captain Bernard O'Hare, had been stationed at the bottom of a secret underground silo for eleven years and had emerged to find out "what on Earth was going on". He had with him a helicopter which Wilbur would use first to drop off Villavicencio to his fellow Daffodils in Indianapolis, then to Urbana to meet with von Peterswald, and finally to his family home in Vermont. En route, Wilbur witnessed from the helicopter the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in which Vera was a cook in one of the King of Michigan's field kitchens.[12]

Lake Maxinkuckee beach at Culver

Lake Maxincuckee

Despite the suffering and hardship in the city, Wilbur and Villavicencio were greeted in Indianapolis as royalty. Impressed, O'Hare, who was not assigned a middle name, asked to become a Daffodil, which Wilbur bestowed. All three attended a weekly family meeting as voting members, with the chairperson randomly selected. That night it was an 11 year old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-11 Garland, who ran the meeting with gravitas and under Robert's Rules of Order, which Wilbur now considers one of the United States' great inventions, along with The Bill of Rights, the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the artificial extended families developed by he and Eliza. The first business was to determine which four members would be sent to replace soldiers lost in the King of Michigan's army against the Great Lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma. One young man, enthusiastic to kill others provided they weren't Daffodils, was shouted down by the group, both because war should be seen as a tragedy, not fun, and also because he had several illegitimate children and should not be allowed to escape his responsibilities. Instead, three people who "had had the most carefree lives so far" were voted into duty. Next, a young woman "clearly crazed by altruism" offered to house at least twenty incoming refugees but was rejected due to her well-known irresponsibility, including her own children moving in with other Daffodil relatives.

Finally, Wilbur addressed the crowd, many of whom were also searchers for the kidnapped Jesus. He stated that he was proud that the Daffodil family was so strong and responsible, recognizing that unlike nations, families cannot help but see war as involving not strangers but relatives. Invited by the King of Michigan to his Summer Palace on Lake Maxinkuckee, Wilbur found that the king was Stewart Oriole-2 Mott, the grandson of his childhood doctor. He had invited the President to sign a document surrendering the United States' claim over the Louisiana Territory in exchange for one dollar. Signing it, Wilbur continued on to Urbana for "an electronic reunion" with his is sister. However, his autobiography takes a break from recounting the past since he drank too much the previous night at his birthday party, where Vera had her slaves place a thousand candles she had had made into his candlestick collection and lit them. Surrounded by all the lights, Wilbur felt like God up to his knees in the Milky Way.[13]

Epilogue[]

Wilbur died before he could finish his autobiography, but there was no one to read it anyway, "to complain about all the loose ends". The story had reached its climax with the reselling of the Louisiana Purchase. He died proud of he and his sister's scheme to reform their society. The two spoke for the last time in Urbana, using a device called "The Hooligan", allowing them to once again produce their shared genius of childhood. They spoke in the company of von Peterswald and her son David, who suffered from Tourette's Syndrome and screamed out obscenities during the conversation. Wilbur listened by crouching from the top of the cabinet, leaning his head next to the pipe to be as close as he could to his sister.

Eliza asked him to die as soon as possible, so they could get together and find ways to improve the utterly and eternally boring afterlife. The two then determined the sources of the illnesses that had plagued the country—the flu germs were Martians and The Green Death were microscopic Chinese who meant no harm but were fatal when inside normal sized humans. Afterward, David told Wilbur that while using The Hooligan he looked like "the biggest baboon in the world—trying to fuck a football", and Wilbur gave him his eleven remaining tri-benzo-Deportamil. He underwent six days of withdrawals, tied to a bed in Wilma von Peterswald's house. At some point during that event, the two had sex, producing the father of Melody Oriole-2 von Peterswald.[14]

Intending to die by The Green Death, Wilbur was lowered down onto the observation deck of the Empire State Building by O'Hare. When reaching the ground floor, he was captured by six members of the Raspberry family. When they discovered he was a doctor, they forced him to eat the antidote and took him to the patriarch of the family, Hiroshi Raspberry-20 Yamashiro, who was ill with pneumonia. Wilbur was unable to provide anything but palliative care, but the fever broke and the Raspberries offered him a reward. To be polite, Wilbur selected a candlestick, thus creating the legend "that he was crazy about candlesticks". Not enjoying communal life nor the family's constant search for the kidnapped Jesus, he moved into the Empire State Building lobby. Vera arrived later and served as his nurse before starting her farm.

Much later, Melody arrived, pregnant and bearing a Dresden candlestick that was accidentally destroyed by a drunk slave on Wilbur's final birthday. Melody’s father, Wilbur's son, survived the Urbana Massacre and was forced into service for the victor, the Duke of Oklahoma. At 14 he fathered Melody with a 40 year old laundry woman. She was given the middle name "Oriole-2" to evoke maximum sympathy from the forces of the King of Michigan, who had the same name, in case she were captured. When she was—at six years old at the Battle of Iowa City—her father's dying words to her were that she was a princess and granddaughter of the King of Candlesticks in New York. She was kept in servitude by the king until she escaped one night with the stolen candlestick. She traveled east to find her grandfather in one of the tallest buildings in the world, encountering kindness along the way in the form of food, clothing, and eventually a boat ride across the Harlem River to the Island of Death, at the risk of the boatman's own life.[15]

Franklin Library Edition[]

In the fall of 1976, the Franklin Library privately printed a specially designed "deluxe" edition of Slapstick for members of its Signed First Editions Society.[16] It was bound in a full-leather case with 22-karet-gold stamping with a gilt top stain, moiré-fabric endpapers, and a satin ribbon marker.[17] Vonnegut wrote a "Special Message" for this edition.

Summary[]

With this book, Vonnegut stopped using "Jr." in his name. It is seventeen years after the death of his father, which is when American convention generally suggests it should be dropped. His children often refer to him as "Junior" when he's not around and he hopes this change will make him more dignified and subject to "fewer stupid jokes" at his expense. While his favorite song, "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life" says that love is what all people seek, Vonnegut thinks that as one gets older, one wants dignity more. Dropping "Jr." from his name is part of that.

The human pursuit of dignity is more comical than the pursuit of love, since humans are surely the least dignified member of the animal kingdom, probably because we speak. Animals do not reveal the "embarrassing junk in their heads" while most humans constantly work with language, displaying their thoughts. Some human beings, like Vonnegut himself, even earn a living making "permanent museums of our head junk" called books, so being called "Junior" is the least of his problems in reclaiming dignity.

Some thoughts, like the Sermon on the Mount, The Iliad, Hamlet, and The Inferno increased the dignity of their authors and humanity in general, but this is rare. It is for those types of creations that books with "fancy bindings" were invented, not for Vonnegut's works, which should be bound in cardboard and sold next to "sex books and science fiction and nurse stories and gothic novels—on racks in bus stations and PX's". Despite that, he says he worked very hard on this book and it really was the best that he could do.[18]

Background[]

Slapstick was the first book Vonnegut wrote at the townhouse at 228 E. 48th Street in the Turtle Bay area of Manhattan, which he purchased in the fall of 1973 and would serve as his primary residence for the rest of his life.[16] He discussed an early version of the work in a Playboy interview printed in July 1973. There he framed it as a Kilgore Trout story in which the government understands that "it's too clumsy and slow" to properly care for people. Inspired during a visit to Nigeria by the extended families found there, which take care of their own sick and elderly, the President mandated the creation of artificial extended families by law. Computers at the Social Security Administration assigned everyone thousands of random relatives through new middle names. In the story, a political refugee is given his new middle name, becoming Laszlo Daffodil Blintz with 20,000 relatives all over the United States, complete with family directories and monthly family magazines. As with a blood relative, he can "tell them to go screw" if he feels unwilling to help his government issued relatives, as well as rejecting favors to non-relatives, who have plenty of other people to help them.[19] He also spoke earlier in this interview about the human need for permanent communities of relatives.

McGovern For President

McGovern/Shriver '72 campaign buttons

The phrase "Lonesome No More!" originated as a suggestion for the presidential campaign of George McGovern against the incumbent Richard Nixon in 1972. Vonnegut slightly knew McGovern's vice presidential running mate, Sargent Shriver, who asked him if he had any campaign ideas. Vonnegut replied that the biggest killer of Americans was loneliness and that they could win against the Republicans if they promised to solve this problem and suggested the slogan for their campaign.[20] He further stated that the rich want the masses to be lonesome, because they can be manipulated more easily. During the Great Depression, people banded together, and only by neighbors coming together to start by cleaning up their own neighborhoods could people have power again. Vonnegut called this "the kind of demagoguery" of which he could approve.[21] The only way he saw this as possible was to return to having extended families.[22]

The novel was drafted under the working title The Relatives from fall 1974 until at least Christmas 1975.[23] In an interview dated "Fall 1976", Vonnegut discussed the difficulties he found in ending novels, although stated that he already knew how Slapstick would end.[24] He reaffirms this later in the interview,[25] saying that he had just completed the prologue "telling the readers who the characters will be", still referring to it as The Relatives, or Lonesome No More, and expecting it would be published within two months.[26] The manuscript was delivered in March 1976 and a substantial excerpt was released in Playboy in September of that year, titled "Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! The Strange Memoirs of the Final American President".[16]

Reception[]

In a self-interview first published in The Paris Review in 1977, Vonnegut noted that Slapstick was subject to several negative, even hostile, reviews in "The New York Times, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone", but joked that it was loved "in Medicine Hat". He admitted that it "may be a very bad book", noting that all writers produce bad work from time to time, and that he was no different. What surprised him was that many critics used the occasion to argue that the novel was evidence that Vonnegut had, in fact, never been a good writer and previous praise of him should be withdrawn. He said the experience felt nearly as bad as "sleeping standing upright on a boxcar in Germany again".[27] In his own self-evaluation of his body of work in Palm Sunday, Vonnegut himself graded the novel a "D".[28] In later lectures, he would refer to it as "shit" and was once asked if he wished he could recall it "the way Detroit automakers recall cars".[29] Vonnegut also noted that it was the first American novel to use the metric system throughout the book. Since no one else noticed, he now had "to toot [his] own horn about it."[30]

The New York Times[]

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in his "Books of the Times" column, published a review of Slapstick in the New York Times on September 24, 1976.[31] Lehmann-Haupt remarked that in Vonnegut’s previous novel, Breakfast of Champions, he stated that he was giving up storytelling and this novel seems to indicate that he was serious about this. The paragraphs are shorter, the repetition is greater, and the "radical innocence" that wonders why life must be horrible is unchanged. If not giving up on storytelling, Vonnegut is at least putting far less effort into it. While the autobiographical prologue is diverting, and there are some "amusing" and even "graceful" moments, after reading the book the feeling is like having "devoured a bowl of air" and nothing but a sense of emptiness pervades.[32]

Roger Sale, the brother of Kirkpatrick Sale, wrote a review in the New York Times Book Review published October 3, 1976, in which he called the novel "flashy, clever and empty". Noting that Vonnegut is a popular novelist whose works are all "very much like another", Sale also felt compelled to explain why this is. He objected to the simplistic, repetitive language, characters, and ideas, noting that like Vonnegut’s other works, Slapstick wanders with "no beginnings, middles or ends, no suspense, no moral, no causes or effects". His novels could only be appealing to the "slightly laid back, rather dropped out, minimally intelligent young" who accept Vonnegut's "easy, sentimental cynicism" and assertion that "life isn't much good in America because we're all stupid, unloving or both". The book itself is nothing more than "a gesture of contempt for all writers who are willing to be responsible for their creation; for all readers who long to read real books; for anyone whose idea of America is more complicated". While a decade ago with Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut looked to have as much potential as other up and coming authors, he has shown himself to be incapable of anything but the formulaic. Sale said he couldn't imagine that past defenders of Vonnegut, such as Robert Scholes, could possibly continue to do so. In essence, the simplicity of Vonnegut's work prevents the semi-literate, which is how all readers begin, from passing through to genuine literacy.[33]

James T

James T. Farrell

Sale's negative review led to several letters to the editor in defense of both the novel and Vonnegut himself, printed on November 21, 1976. Literary scholar Robert Scholes, who was named specifically in the review to repudiate Vonnegut, replied that he still found his work "witty, wise, compassionate and entertaining". While this is only one person's opinion, so is Sale's criticism, despite his tone of "Papal solemnity". Slapstick is surely a slight novel and not Vonnegut's best work, Scholes said, but it in no way negates its seven predecessors which contain "some of the shrewdest social criticism and most entertaining fiction of the past two decades". The writer James T. Farrell commented that book reviewing should not be "an exercise in personal catharsis" as Sale seems to be doing. Although Farrell said that he has only read some of Vonnegut's work, he has met him a few times and believes him to be a "man of decency and honor" who would not write a review on someone about whom he already had strong opinions.

Author Borden Deal called Slapstick Vonnegut's most "playful novel" since God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, its writing filled with joy and that what is really happening is that a new Vonnegut for the seventies is coming into being. Martin Russ of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania pointed out that Vonnegut may be easy to read, but people often don't finish works that require more effort, and may even simply read for pleasure on occasion. Gisela K. Fleig of Lake Ronkonkoma, New York compared the Tralfamidorian's sense of time to an excerpt from Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Kimberly Doneker of Zioville, Pennsylvania enjoyed some of Vonnegut's novels and thus, despite having also read "Milton, Fielding, Camus, Gide, Woolf, James and Melville in the last year", must be one of the "semiliterate young" and stated that she resents being given a lecture on becoming literate. Claudia Stefan of Fairfield, Connecticut wrote that Vonnegut's message is that "learning and life are marvelously convoluted", alternately hysterical and peaceful, always humorous, and that Sale was taking things far too seriously.

Sale replied to these comments, first by noting that only two of the seven letter writers explicitly mentioned actually reading Slapstick. To Farrell, he said he only feels catharsis when he has a chance to praise and that, if he should not be disqualified from reviewing Vonnegut if he admired him, there's no reason the opposite shouldn't hold true. To Russ he said that great books do not just provide pleasure in reading but rereading. To Deal and Stefan, he replied that he can only say that while they may find Vonnegut valuable, to him he is "verbally lax and uninventive" and without joy. Scholes, he said, seemed to be arguing the position that literature is simply a matter of taste and there is no way to say a work is objectively great. To Doneker and other Vonnegut fans, he could only say that those who do not share their enthusiasm are renouncing neither pleasure nor contemporary literature.[34]

Other Reviews[]

A negative review was also published in Rolling Stone on October 12, 1976 by Greil Marcus, who admitted to a prejudice against Vonnegut. Despite liking Mother Night and aspects of Cat's Cradle, he could not stand the inept Slaughterhouse-Five, which took an important event and diluted it with a "ludicrous... science fiction plot". Vonnegut’s work "aspires to the surreal and the grotesque", but unlike more competent and imaginative writers such as Nathanael West and Günter Grass, never seeks any new forms of storytelling. Like most of his other works, Slapstick has the usual tone of quiet depression about the fact that life seems to be one long, bad joke. Its central premise, that Americans are unhappy because they are lonely and they need not love but common decency, is explicitly laid out in the prologue, which Marcus found insulting since it assumes the reader is "too dumb to understand situational poetry". He called the novel "cute, contrived, demeaning, devoid of real feeling" and commented that someone who can't tell the difference between love for humans and dogs "has no business writing fiction".[35]

William Hogan, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 6, 1976, called it "an infuriating book" to him, a longtime Vonnegut fan since Player Piano, who once found him a sardonic and iconoclastic social critic. Now, in his middle age, Vonnegut seems to have become a sloppy and lazy author, who "instead of writing a novel... has merely doodled one". However, he called the autobiographical prologue "some of the best and most moving" work Vonnegut had yet produced, and if he'd stayed in this vein instead of the funeral-bound daydream he in fact wrote, he might have turned out "a wonderful book".[36]

Philip Revzin in the Wall Street Journal of April 5, 1977 gave a somewhat mixed review, calling the novel entertaining but not particularly profound. Comparing it to the works of its dedicatees, Laurel and Hardy, he noted that similarly it is pleasant enough, has a few chuckles, and ends without the reader fully understanding everything, but not really caring. There are no "cosmic truths" to be found in the book but undeniable "glimpses of unbridled imagination". His interpretation of Swain's plan for artificial extended families is that "as with most Utopian schemes, this one doesn't work exactly as planned" since after a while "poor new relations touch their new-found rich relatives for handouts, restrictive cliques are formed, and the families start fighting each other". However, the work never reaches the point "of being parables warning of the dangers of Big Government or enforced brotherhood". Like most of Vonnegut's work, it features some "not very sophisticated science fiction", "sometimes over-cute writing", and various "offbeat characters".[37]

However, there were some more positive reviews. John Leonard in the Los Angeles Times of September 19, 1976 noted that "Vonnegut is not a cynical writer, but sad" and that his previous work, Breakfast of Champions, took that sadness to new levels. There was fear that such depths had ruined Vonnegut’s power of invention, but Leonard says Slapstick proves this is not the case. The novel is essentially "a fairy tale, set in the future instead of the past", featuring many of the genre's familiar tropes like well-meaning monsters, elves, perilous journeys, and so forth. He praises many of the ideas, such as the miniature Chinese, variable gravity, the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped, Wilbur and Eliza being different parts of their shared genius (in keeping with "recent neurophysiological evidence" about the hemispheres of the brain), and most significantly, the scheme for artificial extended families. While "hi ho" is the primary refrain of the novel, more appropriate is the frequent usage of "I had to laugh", for Vonnegut is examining a world in which it seems that there can be no way to confront its horrors and "nasty surprises" without humor. Calling it "just about perfect" as a fairy tale as well as a stage in Vonnegut's increasingly personal writing, it shows that he has "survived his celebrityhood" with common decency, respect, and principles, although the fact that he "has given up on love" is sad.[38]

The New Yorker[]

John Updike, author at PEN Congress, cropped

John Updike at the 1986 PEN Conference

Perhaps the most notable review was by author John Updike in The New Yorker of October 17, 1976 which in many ways became an overall appraisal of Vonnegut's works. He noted that Vonnegut has dropped the "Junior" from his name and seems "relatively at peace with himself". He said this novel contains more science fiction than any of his work since The Sirens of Titan. It "floats along" almost as an idyll, with its central sociological fancy centered on the artificial extended families, along with the variable gravity, the microscopic Chinese, the drying up of the world's energy sources, a means to talk with the dead, and Wilbur and Eliza's joint genius. Despite the novel's use of extended families, it is really a paean to Vonnegut's own nuclear family. Updike called the novel a "saucy spaghetti of ideas" that nonetheless is consumed clearly and easily.

He then goes on to exam various characters in Vonnegut’s body of work as "diminishingly potent" Prospero-like figures, culminating with Swain, his powers gone, living on his island with his Miranda, in the form of Melody. The book is about what happens after the end of the world, with Manhattan destroyed in multiple ways and evoking the tradition of German fairy tales. While many have criticized Vonnegut, especially as he has grown more "truculent and whimsical", his continued popularity can be attributed to "the generosity of his imagination and the honesty of his pain". Vonnegut’s worries are about "the future, injustice, science, destiny", which can be seen even in his short stories for the "slick" magazines decades earlier. While in that format pain must be dealt with quickly and simply, in the novels it can become "cosmic and comic". It is only in retrospect that such literary invention looks easy.[39]

Adaptation[]

Slapstick of Another Kind (film)

Slapstick of Another Kind movie poster, 1984

The novel, primarily the first half, was the basis for a 1982 film adaptation titled Slapstick of Another Kind. Produced and directed by Steven Paul—who as a child actor had performed the role of Paul Ryan in both the New York theatrical and film versions of Happy Birthday, Wanda June—it starred Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn as the twins Wilbur and Eliza Swain, with Marty Feldman as their servant, Sylvester.[40] Originally, Jerry Lewis was going to play both twins. Although the screenplay is attributed solely to Paul, Vonnegut worked on early drafts of the script, in which he concentrated on the twins' childhood and adolescence, with "tiny Chinese communists in flying saucers". He was given the option to direct, but determined he wasn't qualified.[41]

As the movie progressed, Vonnegut insisted to Paul that as the screenwriter, his only job was to produce a script, not engage in promotion or "hang around in case rewriting is needed in a hurry". He sympathized with him that the movie must be made so quickly, since Lewis was scheduled to begin work on The King of Comedy by Martin Scorsese, but Vonnegut continued to assert that he had "done all a writer is supposed to do... if you have promised more of me to your actors and investors, that was your idea, not mine". Acknowledging their friendship, he nonetheless insisted on professionalism and that all future communication about the film go through his agent, Don Farber.[42]

Like its source material, the film was met with negative reviews. Well-known television critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert panned it, especially the supposed humor around the children's deformities, with the former calling it likely to be "the single worst movie of 1984" and that the "best thing that could ever happen to this film is that it never be shown anywhere". Ebert agreed, calling it offensive, unsavory, and painful, but noted its basis in a Vonnegut novel, in which the monstrous children were used for political and satirical purposes. [43] Vonnegut agreed with Siskel's assessment, once telling Robert Weide that it was a "dreadful movie" that should "never be shown again to anybody". He noted it was "widely scorned" in Europe and was being "recut and rescored" for American release, with Lewis "supposedly the mastermind behind these changes" after Steven Paul pulled a "double-cross" when he announced that he would direct it himself.[44] Lewis was nominated for "Worst Actor" at the 5th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards.[45]

Vonnegut would later explain that the movie, which he said was "a fiasco" and "perfectly terrible", essentially was the project of Paul, whom he called "a show business kid with show biz parents". In his teenage years he invested a great deal of money in film equipment and declared that he would make a movie of Slapstick even before he was old enough to make legal contracts in New York. Vonnegut would discourage him, saying it would be too expensive. Paul, however, eventually put the money together and hired Jerry Lewis, so Vonnegut agreed to the project. Although originally intending to find a director, time constraints pushed Paul to directed it himself, which Vonnegut found "quite a surprise". Saying that Paul "botched it completely", Vonnegut expressed sympathy for him but noted that it doesn't really bother him. Many authors have films made of their books after they've gone out of print, so the movie is all that remains, so Vonnegut considers himself lucky that "[t]he book still exists, and the book is my artifact."[46]

Later assessments were likewise harsh. Vonnegut scholars Kevin Alexander Boon and David Pringle, in their examination of Vonnegut adaptations up to 2000, said that it "circumvents everything that is intelligent" about the work, especially by excluding the narrative about extended artificial families. The "courtesy, kindness, and dignity" which are the basis of all Vonnegut's work are absent, even between the twins. On the technical front, they stated that the "direction and editing are pedestrian, the humor is clumsy and garish, and the script is fatally flawed." Ultimately, they concluded it was "the worst attempt at a film adaptation of Vonnegut's work to date".[47] In a review of both the novel and film, Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club called the book a "somber meditation on the insatiable hunger for connection", an aspect he sees completely lacking from the film, which he said was nonsensical and depressing, as well as "a crass violation of everything Vonnegut stood for".[48]

  1. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 5-9.
  2. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 9-17.
  3. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 19-21.
  4. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 55-59.
  5. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pg. 137.
  6. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 23-42.
  7. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 43-54.
  8. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 60-75.
  9. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 76-90.
  10. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 91-106.
  11. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 107-124.
  12. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 125-140.
  13. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 141-151.
  14. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 153-158.
  15. Slapstick, Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 158-162.
  16. 16.0 16.1 16.2 "Notes on the Texts", Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pg. 843.
  17. "Notes", Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pg. 875.
  18. "A Special Message to readers of the Franklin Library's signed first edition of 'Slapstick'", Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1976-1985, pp. 785-786.
  19. "Playboy Interview", Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, pp. 247-249.
  20. "Thoughts of a Free Thinker", Palm Sunday, pp. 204-205.
  21. "Playboy Interview", Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, pg. 274.
  22. "Thoughts of a Free Thinker", Palm Sunday, pg. 206.
  23. "December 19, 1975", Letters, pg. 229.
  24. "Two Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut", Charles Reilly, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, William Rodney Allen, ed., pg. 199.
  25. "Two Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut", Charles Reilly, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, William Rodney Allen, ed., pg. 206.
  26. "Two Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut", Charles Reilly, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, William Rodney Allen, ed., pg. 205.
  27. "Self-Interview", Palm Sunday, pp. 103-104.
  28. "Chapter XVIII: The Sexual Revolution", Palm Sunday, pg. 312.
  29. "A Skull Session with Kurt Vonnegut", Hank Nuwer, in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, William Rodney Allen, ed., pg. 259.
  30. "Self-Interview", Palm Sunday, pg. 116. However, see references to acres (Slapstick, pg. 24), feet (pg. 53) and possibly bushel (pg. 109) if not used colloquially.
  31. This piece was also occasionally reprinted in an edited form attributed to Anatole Broyard, e.g. the San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 1976.
  32. "Books of the Times", The New York Times, September 24, 1976.
  33. "Slapstick", The New York Times, October 3, 1976.
  34. "Letters to the Editor", The New York Times, November 21, 1976.
  35. "Vonnegut's Bad Joke", Rolling Stone, October 12, 1976, pg. 122.
  36. "World of Books: Vonnegut, Doodling", The San Francisco Chronicle, September 6, 1976.
  37. "An Unbridled Imagination", The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 1977.
  38. "Vonnegut returns to the verities of his 'Slapstick'", The Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1976.
  39. "All's Well in Skyscraper National Park", The New Yorker, October 17, 1976.
  40. Slapstick of Another Kind, IMDb.
  41. "December 20, 1980", Letters, pg. 278.
  42. "March 11, 1981", Letters, pp. 283-284.
  43. "Slapstick of Another Kind, Up the Creek, Strangers Kiss, The Stone Boy, 1984", Siskel and Ebert Movie Reviews.
  44. "November 16, 1983", Letters, pg. 300.
  45. "1984 Archive", Razzies.com (Wayback Machine).
  46. "A Kurt Post-mortem on the Generally Eclectic Theater", David Bianculli, Film Comment, December 1985, pg. 44.
  47. "Vonnegut Films", Kevin Alexander Boon and David Pringle, At Millennium's End: New Essays of the Work of Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Alexander Boon, ed., pg. 187.
  48. "Vonnegutted Case File #173: Slapstick (Of Another Kind)", Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club.
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