CHANGE FOR ITS OWN SAKE:

Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five," dies at age 84 (Cristian Salazar, 4/12/07, The Associated Press)

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, and dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Mr. Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. His experience as a prisoner of war in the 1940s in Germany was the basis for "Slaughterhouse-Five," which was published while the United States waged war in Vietnam.

"Slaughterhouse-Five" is listed 18th on Modern Library's list of 100 best novels.

"There was never a kinder and, at the same time, wittier writer to be with personally," said author Tom Wolfe, a friend of Vonnegut's. " He's the closest thing we had to a Voltaire. He could be extremely funny, but there was a vein of iron always underneath it."

An obscure science-fiction writer for two decades before earning mainstream acclaim in 1969 with "Slaughterhouse-Five," Mr. Vonnegut was an American original, often compared to Mark Twain for a vision that combined social criticism, wildly black humor and a call to basic human decency. He was, novelist Jay MacInerny once said, "a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion."

Mr. Vonnegut lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he believed were dehumanizing people.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Mr. Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Mr. Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He filled his novels with satirical commentary and drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot.

"My motives are political," he once told Playboy magazine. "I agree with Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini that the writer should serve his society. ... Mainly, I think they should be — and biologically have to be — agents of change."

He was the classic case of the author with one good novel in him who just rewrites it endlessly. His central idea was deeply silly: I had a bad experience during WWII, therefore war can serve no decent end. He illustrates the way in which art, which once sought to teach universal truths, has become a vehicle for the self. The subject of his novels is himself.

Ironically, for all his later political correctness his best work is an early politically incorrect one

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 12, 2007 7:29 AM