I loved Vonnegut in high school and then, for reasons I don't in retrospect understand, I classed him among the childish things to put away when I got to college. In the last year or two-- about a decade after college-- I've gone back and read some of the novels I loved in high school. The ones I remember being the best-- Mother Night and Cat's Cradle, e.g.-- are amazing. They're like fascinating and funny clockwork. The individual gears and springs are beautiful in their own right, but when all the pieces come together and function as a whole, it's almost hard to believe.

I didn't remember much about Slapstick. Reading it again, all grow'd up, it's easy to see why. If the best Vonnegut novels are functioning watches, Slapstick reads like it was cobbled together from gears and springs found around the shop, then abandoned half-finished.

Some of the components are wonderful. Slapstick is the book that develops Vonnegut's idea of artificial families-- family groupings based on shared middle names, assigned at random by a computer. It's a neat idea, and he spells out a few imagined ripple-effects. The book also features a long preface, written in his own voice, that is something special. He gives some history of his family, and writes a bit about the origins of Slapstick. In the preface he mentions writing books with his sister in mind-- she the only member of his audience. I don't know if he talks about this elsewhere in more detail, but his comments on writing with his sister in mind-- both before and after she died-- I've always found wonderful and touching. (Also helpful as a suggestion for writing most anything.)

There are also some problems. The Vonnegut tics-- in this book they're “Hi ho” and “And so on”-- don't add any texture to the story. Certainly nothing like the neck-wrenching nihilism of Slaughterhouse 5's “So it goes.” In Slapstick, they're just tics. There are ideas thrown in but not developed. Variable gravity and miniaturized Chinese. These ideas are structurally integrated in a way that makes them seem like they're supposed to be important. But if they serve any purpose of plot, theme, or metaphor, I failed to notice. The book stops abruptly, without resolution. (There's a comment, at the end, about how it is fitting to stop, here, at the climax of the main character's life. But, given the events of the book, no one could take such a claim seriously.) It's almost as if Vonnegut decided to cut his losses after realizing the novel wasn't going to work out.

Broken watches are still fun to look at. Page by page, Slapstick is fun, too. It's got the usual mix of funny and sad, thought-provoking passages mixed with crude humor. Just don't go in mistaking it for a functioning novel. ( )

I'm starting to think that the creative basis for this novel was the phrase "Hi ho", which the narrator, Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain--King of Manhattan, landlord and tenant of the vacant Empire State Building, genius idiot, pediatrician, twin, and former tallest President of the United States--repeats quite often throughout his story. And novels probably shouldn't be based on short, almost meaningless phrases. The story sort of meanders along in that effortlessly entertaining way that Vonnegut has, but in the end there doesn't seem to be a point, or much of a plot either. The best thing in here, which could have made for a much better story, was the idea of the Chinese becoming so advanced as a civilization that they shrink down to the size of microorganisms and learn to dematerialize to Mars, cure breast cancer with gongs, and possibly manipulate gravity. That would have been an awesome novel right there, but it's just mentioned in the periphery of the main goings-on of the book. Which doesn't really have an ending, by the way. It just sort of stops.

I guess this is one to read if you already like Kurt Vonnegut and want to read all of his books, but if you haven't tried him yet then I would avoid Slapstick for now. ( )

This typical Vonnegut novel weaves in many of his usual settings and topics: Indianapolis; Urbana, Illinois; Dresden (although late and little--see if you can find it); German-Americans; and a future version of Earth--in this case a sort of post-apocalyptic America. Plainly written in his signature style, it is a biography of sorts of a set of twins born deformed, to a very rich family. Their trials and travails of being physically challenged and mentally super-superior makes for some interesting twists and turns, and provoking tragedies and sadness at times. A master designer is to a smock as Vonnegut is to slapstick. Functional, beautiful, tragic, plain, enduring, not believable, Vonnegut. ( )

Even Kurt Vonnegut himself gave this book a 'D'. Clearly not one of his greatest works, but it has a few spots of brilliance here and there. ( )

When you write some great books like "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" it's only natural that some of your books will be disappointingly average. This is one of those books.... ( )