Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Delacourt Press [Seymour Lawrence], 1969)

 

I was underwhelmed and disappointed in Slaughterhouse-Five, which I had been led to believe was a classic of anti-war and counter-culture literature.

Like so much auto-fiction being published today, Vonnegut writes himself into the story of Billy Pilgrim, his stand-in; in fact, Vonnegut acknowledges himself as author as narrator, and includes his own stories from the war alongside and often conflated with Billy's.  For a book purportedly about the bombing of Dresden, the tragedy itself is barely acknowledged and quickly dispatched.   A few incidents about the war are alarming and affecting, but much of the book, especially the sections about Billy's post-war life as an optometrist in a small town in upstate New York which involves ceaseless time travel and a stint being displayed in a zoo on a distant planet after being abducted by aliens -- all of this, which is much of the book, just seems silly and childish, neither funny nor chilling.

And Vonnegut's inability to write ten sentences without including "so it goes" is maddening; you just want to get away from this storyteller with a relentless tic.    Perhaps I'm missing something, but Slaughterhouse-Five  seems like an inferior book that has not aged well.