The Young-Adult Appeal of Kurt Vonnegut

Y ou discover him when you’re 15 or 16, when you have just realized that all adults are numbskulls and that the solutions to the world’s problems lie in whimsical, simple slogans. Peace is better than war! Love beats hate! Corporations are destroying our souls! Money is evil! We should all be like family! Nobody more expertly harnessed those adolescent impulses than Kurt Vonnegut, the greatest young-adult writer of his time. Vonnegut combined silly sci-fi comedy with even sillier oversimplifications to such meretricious effect that his true peer was not another novelist but Dr. Seuss.

Back in high school, the film and TV director Robert Weide, who is today best known for directing many episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, launched a Kurt Vonnegut book club and later struck up a correspondence that led to a decades-spanning friendship and many filmed interviews with the writer. Vonnegut died 14 years ago, so I award Weide no points for swiftness, but he has finally completed a 40-year project with the release of the smart documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time.

The film is a useful introduction to Vonnegut’s life and works and contains interviews in which he sadly discusses the true events that informed so much of his fiction: the World War II bombing of Dresden while he was a German prisoner huddling underground in a former slaughterhouse; the suicide of his mother; and the death of his beloved sister Alice from cancer at age 40, in 1958. Two days before she died, her husband also perished, in a freak train accident, which left Vonnegut (who had three kids of his own with his wife, Jane) to look after his four orphaned nephews, three of whom he adopted.

A large, rambunctious family is hardly conducive to fiction writing, but Vonnegut, in between bouts of yelling at the kids, plugged away in anonymity for 17 years after publishing his first novel, Player Piano, for a $2,500 advance in 1952. One of his sons recalls the Old Man asking to borrow $100 when the boy was 12. Living on Cape Cod, where he briefly ran a Saab dealership, Vonnegut kept publishing stories and novels throughout the Fifties and Sixties as the world shrugged. Then he finally hit the best-seller list in 1969 with a defining Boomer anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Nearing 50, Vonnegut was suddenly one of the most famous writers in America.

Adopting the look and aspect of Mark Twain, Vonnegut became the mustachioed humorist-sage of American letters and was a pioneer of the aggressively whimsical campus commencement speech. After all, who are newly minted graduates but young adults? Vonnegut began saving videotapes of his speeches and sending them to Weide, whom he thought of as his archivist. He also sent Weide his wacky, nervy artwork, the elaborate doodles that on many occasions graced his books and made them highly digestible to the young-adult sensibility.

Thanks to all of this personal reflection that Weide caught on film, the doc is gold for Vonnegut buffs. As for those who decline to revere him, there are plenty of revealing moments. At the 60th anniversary of his high-school graduation, Vonnegut speaks to a classmate who was severely wounded in the Pacific in World War II and advises him, “Have you considered suing your government? They had no right to do that to you.” So the United States should . . . not have fought back after being attacked by Japan? What kind of earth would we be inhabiting if we actually took Vonnegut’s pacifism seriously? It could only be a world run by monsters. Both the U.S. and Japan are immensely better off today because Japan lost the war, with all of the bloodshed that was necessary. Yet the Vonnegut karass (artificial family, a term from Cat’s Cradle) of the peace-minded would have declined to take up arms because War is Bad. Hapless anti-war types would be left muttering, “So it goes, so it goes” as murderous regimes take over the planet.

The most admirable figure in the film is not Vonnegut but his first wife, Jane, whom he dumped shortly after he became famous and took up the literary high life in New York City. During his long years of struggle, Jane would attach urgent, pleading cover letters to his magazine submissions — a shot of Vonnegut’s carefully preserved sheaf of rejection slips should inspire any writer who has ever felt like giving up — telling editors that her husband was another Chekhov. Even after he left her for the photographer Jill Krementz, Jane continued to speak without rancor of Vonnegut and to admire his work until her death in 1986.

Vonnegut died in 2007, and as we await the day when machines finally put everyone out of work, as he foretold in Player Piano 70 years ago, he looks very much like many other Boomer prophets whose naivety grew embarrassing over time. Referring to a clip of Vonnegut’s cameo from the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School, Weide calls this “in some ways the most memorable thing he’s ever done.” Ouch.