V's Pick #4: Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut

This is a book about family. By that I mean: incest, war, disease, deformation, drugs, wealth, middle names, The Chinese, loneliness, gravity, twins, Indianapolis and candlesticks.

This is my third Vonnegut book and it's by far, the most totally and wholly messed up novel I've ever read. I enjoyed every minute of it, finishing cover-to-cover, in less than 24 hours. It's the tale of The King of Manhattan (the last president of the United States) who is over 100 years old as he writes his memoir. He was born grossly deformed and shunned to a giant mansion in Vermont on the grounds of an apple orchard with this twin sister, Eliza. They share a touch-senstive mental connection which results in their inappropriate physical awareness of each other on multiple occasions. Until the age of 15, they are richly dressed by a colony of workers hired by their parents to care for them and in order to remain in their paradise, they pretend to be mentally retarded while secretly, their brains combined equal some form of genius. Their union is part Adam and Eve and thus the story of their "love" is doused with metaphor of The Fall. Upon the end of their secret, they face the most devastating of fates: separation.

Vonnegut writes in the Prologue that he thought of this novel on a place ride to Indianapolis with his scientist brother, an empty seat between them holding the NY Times which should have held their deceased sister, Alice. He gives meaning to the characters before they're introduced but as I read, I thought he was wrong. Who he said equalled what for him in the novel doesn't seem correct to me. Rather, I feel, he wrote this novel as a eulogy for his sister - an effort to exorcise the emptiness of being lonesome for someone. He says of Alice: "She was the secret of my technique. Any creation which has any wholeness and harmoniousness, I suspect, was made by an artist or inventor with an audience of one in mind."

My favorite line from the novel is as follows: "Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back."

So, say what he may about his reasons for writing it, but Slapstick (alternatively titled Lonesome No More) is a novel about grief. It's a novel about an old man looking back on his life and those who he's outlived, feeling somewhat guilty and somewhat glad. How does a deformed man of average intelligence become a Harvard graduate, the King of Manhattan, rename the entire country and make families out of strangers? He does it because he's lonely for someone. And like all Vonnegut I've read, that old man writes it in a tone that presents both hopelessness and true, amazingly deep, hopefulness.

It will be a long time before I forget this book...and Alice should be proud of her brother, for such a display of disgustingly beautiful grief in her wake. RIP, "Betty and Bobby Brown."