recommended reading

Last I checked, we were due for a full review of Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut; another full review of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, which I've finally, finally finished; and first impressions of The Reivers by William Faulkner. So let's get to it, shall we?

I didn't like Slaughterhouse-Five. It was well-written, somewhat humorous, gorily real, and relentlessly bleak. It had all the elements of a truthful war novel. World War II and the fire-bombing of Dresden are central to the story, but the book itself concerns the life of one Billy Pilgrim, a hapless dentist, attempting to live his life and not being allowed to. But this is a science-fiction novel. Vonnegut being Vonnegut, there were some wild cards thrown in. Pilgrim lives his life: he's a child; begins going to dentistry school; enters the military in World War II; is captured by the Germans; is death-marched through snow and crammed into a cattle car with dozens of other P.O.W.s; is taken to Dresden, Germany; stuck in a disused (and titular) slaughterhouse; is therefore one of the few to survive the bombing; emerges into the ruined city a free man (the guards were killed); lives a dull-as-dishwater life in 1950s America; is kidnapped by an alien race from the planet Tralfamadore, which exhibits him in a zoo with another Earthling, a captured female porn star; and is finally assassinated by a laser blast in a balkanized 1976 America.

But he doesn't do it in that order.

Billy has become "unstuck in time," meaning that he flashes back and forth between moments of his life with no apparent rhyme or reason. One minute, he'll be making love to his porn-star mate in the zoo on Tralfamadore; the next, he'll be sitting in the snow in Germany in 1944, under the watchful eye of his captors; next, enthusiastically giving a speech on flying saucers moments before his death.

Needless to say, this made for a rather challenging read. Slaughterhouse-Five is the apotheosis of anti-war novels. Vonnegut pulls no punches in his portrayal of character, action, and thought in armed conflict. The cruelty, deprivation, brutality and insanity of warfare are put under halogen lamps and dissected in detail.

Vonnegut also eviscerates the jingoism he perceived behind the American war effort. He accomplishes this with a character called Roland Weary. Weary, a loud-mouthed and violent soldier, holds nothing but contempt for apathetic, timid Billy. He continuously chivvies and ridicules Billy, blaming him for their separation from the main force and their subsequent capture. He inflates himself, brags loudly of his war exploits, and is full of talk and bluster and false heroism. It does him no good. After his capture, the Germans confiscate Weary's boots and replace them with wooden clogs, which lacerate his feet over the course of many miles. Weary eventually dies from gangrene in the cattle car en route to Dresden, cursing Billy's name. With his last breath, he convinces another P.O.W., a short, skinny and profane man named Lazzaro, that he must kill Billy in retaliation.

The book contains a larger lesson about perspective and consequence, apart from its anti-war sentiments. The Tralfamadorians are a perceptive race. They can see in four dimensions: height, width, depth, and time. They can perceive past, future, and present as an uninterrupted continuum, and thus know the consequences and repercussions of all events. Vonnegut compares it to looking at a mountain range. Whereas a human might only see one mountain, the Tralfamadorians can see all the mountains in the range, stretching away to either horizon. Therefore, they are as fatalistic as fatalistic can be. There is no preventing or altering the course of events; one must simply accept them. The aliens have even foretold the annihilation of the universe (a result of a one of their own scientific experiments), but have made no effort to prevent it. The Tralfamadorians believe that, after death, beings continue to live in other times and places, and thus they are indifferent about death. Their stock answer to the phenomenon is "So it goes."

As you may imagine, the text of the novel is saturated with the phrase "So it goes."

Any morals or conclusions to be made at the end of Slaughterhouse-Five (or what we might reasonably call the end) are left to the reader. The anti-war message is clear, but we are never given the impression that Vonnegut is really trying to get us to stop killing each other. He was a satirist, after all. He had one goal, and it was the same as a court jester's: to show us our own folly by crafting some of his own. He was not out to proselytize; he instructed us by showing us what not to do. We could take it or leave it as we pleased. That was one of the (few) things I appreciated about the book: the rationale behind Vonnegut's stance. He was anti-war before it was cool. He was not a hippie, or anti-American, or a member of a subversive, idealistic, ignorant counterculture. He was anti-war because he'd actually been in a war. The book was based (however loosely) on his experiences as a soldier in World War II. He was actually captured. He was held in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. He did witness the firestorm that consumed the city. And he was soul-scarred by the loss of his friends and his exposure to death. That I can respect.

As for the matter of perspective...well, Billy's woefully blinkered lifestyle is as much a quiet warning as a half-fictitious tragicomic romp. Vonnegut's point, as near as I could make out, was that we must take extra care in making choices which direct our lives, for we are unable to see the consequences of those actions. Whoever signed the orders for the bombing of Dresden had little idea that he was consigning thousands of German civilians to a hellish death. (Or worse, perhaps he did.) On the other hand, thanks to his being "unstuck in time," Billy Pilgrim knew full well that lecturing on flying saucers in Chicago in 1976 would get him killed. And yet he went and lectured anyway. He felt people needed to know about the Tralfamadorians, and what they could see. Maybe Vonnegut felt the same way.

I've as much to say (if not more) about Little Women. I'd hate to bore you, though. The book bears out the impressions I spoke of before. At every turn, I was gobsmacked by how true-to-life Alcott's characters and situations are, even 142 years after the book was written. Her descriptions of young love are dead-on, down to the last flutter of the heart. The tragedies of losing a loved one seem distant at times, but only because of Alcott's proper and literate style—the emotion is there, and utterly real. The ups-and-downs of physical separation, unrequited love, leaving the nest, and ultimately finding one's way in the world are all luridly described. The novel is a paean to the half-painful, half-joyous transition from childhood to adulthood. A truthful paean, no less. That's where the eminence and success of this book lies (as Louisa would've been the first to tell you)—realism. Her characters seem real. The feelings are real. The happenings are real, no matter how trivial. From the tiniest vignette to the most earth-shaking revelation, there is never an instant when the reader sits back and thinks, "Nah, that'd never happen."

I finished the book with the impression that I'd just read an epic. I'd become immersed in the credible, whimsical, familiar world which Alcott had molded with such subtle mastery. I'd followed these characters—motherly Meg, flyaway Jo, gentle Beth, preening Amy, swashbuckling Laurie—through years of trials, hardship, suffering, triumph, achievement, realization, and maturation. I'd witnessed the four girls growing up, right before my eyes. Such a simple thing, and yet so truthfully depicted as to make a brave man weep. I was never sure where the story would go next, nor how it would end. But I knew everybody would keep on plugging away. Eventually, they'd win through—and learn something in the process.

And despite the complete lack of explosions, gunfire, evil wizards, time warps, black holes, airplanes, monsters, pirate ships, derring-do, or any other requisite normally needed to hold my attention...I was hooked from Chapter One. Alcott herself is an honorable blend of Mark Twain and Aesop. She appends each episode in the life of the March girls with a valuable lesson. Jo chooses quality over popularity in her novel-writing; Amy learns that true happiness comes from piety, humility, and service to others, not in mirrors and ribbons and furbelows; Meg discovers the timeless mystery of balancing children, husband and household; Laurie, with the girls' help, evolves from a rambunctious dilettante to a productive, upstanding, useful man. These transformations were a joy to witness—inspiring, vivifying, electrifying, as much for their believability (and the lessons taken from them) as the delightful way in which they were told.

In short, I really cannot praise this book highly enough. It is, to my mind, what a novel should be: an exploration of the human condition; a tale of realistic protagonists under challenging circumstances, learning and developing and changing as they go; a vivid world, depicted clearly and brightly, worth spending time in; a sentiment expressed, a belief expounded, food for thought; and a rollicking good story besides. Little Women fits the bill to a T.
And so we come to The Reivers, my first taste of Faulkner. It's 1905. Mississippi. A womanizing part-Indian, an under-scrupulous black retainer, and Huck-Finn-gone-bad are heading for a Memphis brothel. It's a trip, says the back cover, "that makes LSD seem tame." Now, this oughta be rather interesting, too.