When you gather people together in a room to tell them someone has died, they react in different ways. Some people immediately begin to weep. Some get angry. Some provide comfort. Some have eloquent, thoughtful things to say. Some leave the room, go sit outside for a while, and drool. I came back inside today.
If you're in this room right now, you've probably talked to someone else who's in it. What I've heard the most besides good quotes is Which one is your favorite? It's a nice question to ask because everyone in the room already has an answer. There's no need to think it over very much.
My answer has always been the novel Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More! Published the year of the American Bicentennial, here's the summary:
Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. (Super-intelligent, miniaturized Chinese watch the West self-destruct from the sidelines.) Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern, then moved to deserted New York City, where he writes a thoughtful missive before death.
Of course, I can't find a cite now...but Slapstick wasn't one of Vonnegut's own favorites. The New York Times review, hidden behind the velvet curtain, calls it a "book full of air" -- and not in a nice way, either.
While the summary makes Slapstick sound like a end-times dystopian novel, I've always thought that was incidental. For me, the book has always been a love story. Wilbur and Eliza. They are utterly incomplete without each other. When they ARE together? Things happen which are both terrifying and beautiful. But their obstacles aren't ones that people typically fantasize about having, either. They're both utterly grotesque, they're siblings. They live in a society filled with people who don't understand much of anything, and next to one that has its own plans entirely.
There is one scene in the book that comes closest to being romantic. It says more about the nature of love than a lot of art that proclaims loudly to be about love does. And according to the prologue of Slapstick, Vonnegut says he can't distinguish between love for humans and love for dogs? So much the better. If anyone ever tries again to make a movie, this is the scene I pray they get right:
Since Wilbur is the twin who can read and write, he receives an education and his sister is sent to a mental institution. Wilbur does nothing to interfere with this. When Wilbur graduates from medical school, he has a graduation party and Eliza flies over the party in a helicopter. She reads him the first half of Sonnet 39 over a bullhorn (!!), and then this happens.
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I called up to her through my cupped hands. "Eliza!" I said. And then I shouted something daring, and something I genuinely felt for the first time in my life.
"Eliza! I love you!" I said.
All was darkness now.
"Did you hear me, Eliza?" I said. "I love you! I really love you!"
"I heard you," she said. "Nobody should ever say that to anybody."
"I mean it," I said.
"Then I will say in turn something that I really mean, my brother - my twin."
"What is it?" I said.
She said this: "God guide the hand and mind of Dr. Wilbur Rockefeller Swain."
And then the helicopter flew away.
Hi ho.
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I never met Kurt Vonnegut. I'd heard he was ready to go. Yet, like everyone else in this crowded room, I miss him.
So it goes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atABhlMLYvU
Posted by: Storey | April 13, 2007 at 07:56 PM