A detailed and interesting biography of Kurt Vonnegut. I don`t agree with some of the reviews saying the writer of the book hates Vonnegut. The person I see in the book is deeply human and very fallible but at the end rather likeable. ( )

Thoroughly researched and honest, this is a great read for anyone who has ever read and loved Vonnegut's books. I read him when I was in high school, and now I'm happy to say I understand where most of those books were coming from. He was another genius who was misunderstood by those around him, and he also battled personal demons all his life.

Shields is a great biographer and very sympathetic towards Vonnegut. This book is rather long but it was worth slogging through. ( )

I thought about giving this four stars, because it doesn't really try to get inside Kurt's head, but then, all of Vonnegut's books are so autobiographical that it wouldn't have added much. This biography gives you all the context you could want to go along with the inner life in the books. Going over that in detail would have added another hundred or two pages to the bio without much benefit. I'd much rather spend the time re-reading The Sirens of Titan or Slaughterhouse Five, now that I know where they came from.

Warning, this is a sad book in many places. Vonnegut was a sad and damaged person. Perhaps the one weakness in this bio is that it goes through the POW years pretty quickly. Those years never left Vonnegut. ( )

9 stars: Super, couldn’t put it down

From the back cover: Kurt Vonnegut remains one of the most influential, controversial, and popular novelists of the twentieth century. Millions know him as a counterculture guru, antiwar activist, and satirist of American culture. But few outside his family and friends knew the full arc of his extraordinary life. How he made friends easily but always felt lonely. How he sold millions of books but never felt appreciated., how he described himself as a humanist but fought with humanity at large. As a former public relations man, he crafted his image carefully- the avuncular, curly haired humorist- though he admitted ‘I myself am a work of fiction’.

A fascinating read! The author not only had access to Vonnegut, but was one of the last people to see him alive before the fall which ultimately killed him. I read this while I was isolated in bed from a major home remodel, and it kept me wanting for more. Vonnegut was a person of contradictions, and often unable to get out of his own way. This was also a very balanced read, not a “hit piece” nor was it idolatry. Other reviewers often found it to be a hit, but I did not – the hit was against the persona which Vonnegut often portrayed, whereas the real man (like all of us) was more flawed. Still, I found much to admire as well and am glad I read this book. I’m sure I’ll look through it again.

Some quotes I liked:

{His mother, Edith, killed herself on Mother’s Day]. Edit Vonnegut left a bedeviling “legacy…an air of defeat has always been a companion of mine.” Disquieting thoughts about self destruction stung him throughout his life because her deliberately timed death on Mother’s Day. It jeered at his devotion. He inferred that she had not loved him, which created a self hating syllogism; she did not love me; I didn’t love her enough, therefore I am a failure at love.

On long marches, his assigned buddy in the 423rd regiment would get fed up having to “walk behind him and pick up all the utensils falling out of his backpack. He could never do it right.” He seemed unwilling to believe that his survival would largely depend on what he carried. Observing him, Vonnegut realized ‘Joe didn’t understand the war and of course there was nothing to understand. The world had gone completely mad.” In this bewildered young man who kept expecting a rationale that would explain to his satifsfaction the ultimate bedlam that is war, Vonnegut later found the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, for Slaughterhouse Five.

What he believed about himself, his family, American society he realized, was contingent on Western theories, laws, custom, morals. “Culture is a gadget, its something we inherit.” His ironic distance as a novelist, sounding as detached as an entomologist observing insects, can be traced to his days as an anthropology student.

A character in the novel [Player Piano] asks the supercomputer ‘What are people for?”As it turned out, the query would become, over he next four decades, the riddle behind most of Vonnegut’s novels.
Kurt glumly followed a nurse into Jane’s room, where she was waiting with their infant daughter. After the nurse left them alone, he sat down heavily on the edge of his wife’s bed, put his head in his hands, and began to sob. He told her he almost drove off a bridge on his way to the hospital. He couldn’t stop crying.

Like his mother, Kurt was not good at facing emotional adversity—physical, yes, as evidenced by how he survived the death march to Stalag IV, a starvation diet, and the fifty mile march out of Dresden…But emotional demands were harder for him to handle. He responded with humor, and to his male friends with a kind of teasing chumminess, but in general he distanced himself, especially from those who needed him most, rather than put those feelings at risk.

Theodore Sturgeon would become the model for one of Vonnegut’s best known characters, Kilgore Trout, the wise fool of science fiction, ignored, sold only in pornographic bookstores, and half mad with frustration. But Sturgeon wasn’t fictional character, his reversals and blows to his pride were real. And Kurt was afraid he had just witnessed a glimpse of his own future too. “Kilgore Trout is the lonesome and unappreciated writer I thought I might become.”

Kurt’s nephew found “there was a definite disconnect between the kind of guy you would imagine Kurt must be from the tone of his books, the kind of guy who would say “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind” and the reality of his behavior on a daily basis. He was a complicated, difficult man. I think he admired the idea of love, community and family from a distance, but couldn’t deal with the complicated, emotional elements they included.

He was sensitive to Mary O’Hare’s criticism that he would glorify war. Consequently, he took the everyman perspective of someone bewildered by events, in keeping with the theme that profound puzzlement is the only way to come to terms with death and mass killing…. Leslie Fiedler suggested that what was omitted from the novel gave beauty to it as a whole. “Slaughterhouse Five was ‘less about Dresden than about Vonnegut’s failure to come to terms with it.”

The tone of “Breakfast of Champions” is abject and apologetic; Vonnegut ashamedly admits to thoughts of self destruction: “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did.” He seems unable to muster reasons to live. “Suicide is at the heart of this book. It’s also the punctuation mark at the end of many artistic careers.” … he decided his mother’s suicide was a lesson. “The reason you mustn’t consider suicide is because you leave that legacy to the next generation. You give them a reason to do it.”

He made many choices, consciously or unconsciously, that had created multiple contradictory identities. He was a counterculture hero, a guru and a leftist to his fans; a wealthy investor to his broker, a champion of family and community and yet a distant father, a man who had left his child centered home to save his sanity, but then married a younger woman who was leading him into fatherhood again, a satirist of American life but feeding at the trough of celebrity up to his ears.

Jane was unable to “let go”… Three days later the hospice nurse told her “she could go now” and she passed away into a coma at 8 PM that evening. [Haunting, as those words were precisely what Will told my mother, and she died minutes later].

[Haiku his adopted son / nephew wrote for his memorial]
I’Ve seen you reach out
To say you love In your way
I’ve seen you. I thank you. ( )

3.5 stars.

I'm not much of a reader of nonfiction, and I don't know when I last read a biography... but And So It Goes held my interest, probably because Shields maintains a decent balance of world history, Vonnegut family distress, and information about Vonnegut's books. I think the book might be particularly useful for readers (like me) who wonder why they lost interest in Vonnegut. ( )