"The Fall of a Climber" is a review of Any God Will Do, the sixth novel by Richard Condon, printed in the New York Times Book Review on September 25, 1966. Replying on July 15, 1970 to a letter from Condon complimenting Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut called this review "very stupid", saying he "lacked the brains and bounce at the time to see that [the book] was excellent".[1]
Summary[]
Despite being an American, Condon's book has middle-European "echoes of Friedrich Durrenmatt, Max Frisch" as well as "Thomas Mann, since a lot of the action takes place in a Swiss sanitarium". The anti-hero, Francis Vollmer, is a New York City banker and orphan of two American circus dwarfs. Having embezzled half a million dollars, he falls in love with a noblewoman and pays a genealogist to prove that he's heir to a British title. A hollow man, he attempts to fill himself with information about painting, music, cooking, and other higher pleasures, but like all social climbers ends up like "a goat with a bellyful of jewelry". This pretend enthusiasm for culture may in fact be identical to those who've already attained high social positions. The best parts of the book are about food since Vollmer becomes a great cook, while the poorest sections are on the empty or cartoonish characters. Vonnegut calls it "an honorable failure", the latter because despite some cleverness it is ultimately boring, the former because it tries to say big ideas without pretension. Its biggest problem is that literature can deal with characters who think they are empty, as in Kafka, but apparently can't talk interestingly about someone truly empty.[2]
- ↑ "July 15, 1970," Letters, pp. 160-161.
- ↑ "The Fall of a Climber," New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1966, pp. 5, 42.