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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Pilgrim's Progress, November 8, 2011
This review is from: And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Hardcover)
Dresden, Germany. The night of February 13, 1945. Remnants of the Army's 423rd Regiment, 106th Division, captured almost as soon as they began fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, are roused from their bunks in a POW camp by an airraid siren. They are hustled into a meat locker, 60 feet below ground. German prison guards enter the bunker with them, and shut the steel door behind them. Above ground, the night time firebombing of Dresden begins. In the one thousand degree heat, "super heated tornadoes had sucked out the oxygen and turned hiding places into tombs." The bombing continued into the night. At dawn the next day, the POW's emerged from the meat locker to see what had happened, Private Kurt Vonnegut among them. What he saw that day colored his entire career and formed the basis for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse 5. The new Charles J. Shields biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, doesn't adhere to the love-hate mentality that was in vogue between biographers and their subjects a generation ago. In the current book, biographer and author seemed genuinely to like each other in the brief period they worked together. One could go so far as to say that before Vonnegut's death, they were well on their way to becoming, well, pals. Ah, I thought to myself. This biographer will suck up in person, then skewer the old man after he dies. It never happens. This is not to say Vonnegut gets a free pass. Infidelities and indiscretions are on full view, and never more so than in the Fall of 1965 when the author begins an affair at the famous University of Iowa creative writing workshop. As his fame grows, so do the number of extra marital liaisons, most spectacularly with Jill Krementz, a photographer who comes off in the book as having the charm and graciousness of Lady Macbeth. During their tryst, wife Jane Vonnegut is rewarded by being left home in the role of family matriarch to supervise the upbringing of their children. In the saddest episode of the book, Vonnegut's brother-in-law Jim Adams is killed in a train wreck and Kurt's sister Alice, terminally ill and grief stricken over the tragedy befallen her husband, also dies and the Vonnegut household is newly infused with four additional children to care for. Even as Jill finds Kurt an apartment in Manhattan where he feasts in regal fashion, Jane is as determined as ever to hold the family together. On page 290, out of the pain of knowing her husband is living with another woman, Jane issues her own prophecy: "Jill will find ways to cut you off from your home", an eerie forecast that comes true not once but twice - most flamboyantly on Page 404 when Vonnegut, smoking during Super Bowl pre-game ceremonies, goes down stairs for a snack, and watches portions of his Manhattan townhouse go up in flames. In a fit of anger, Jill changes the locks on the door for the second time, refusing him entry. If there is any justice in the game of musical beds, surely it came when Vonnegut learns that just as he and Jill deceived Jane, so Jill and investment banker Stephen DuBrul ultimately deceive Kurt. Even that isn't the end of things as DuBrul abruptly terminates the relationship with Jill and she hightails it back to Vonnegut, who has finally had enough of his sugar daddy role and files the first of three petitions to divorce Jill. Even with contretemps like these, it is never the intention of Shields to intentionally debunk or puncture Vonnegut's reputation. If anybody gets skewered, it is literary critics as a group, who ignored him when he was starting out then jumped on his bandwagon as he became a moneymaker. Shields places his subject's actions in the context of success American style. Impoverished most of his life, when the trappings of reward were offered, Vonnegut took full advantage. The writing in this biography is straight forward and devoid of moralizing so that readers don't mind "looking under the hood" to discover that, as his father had done, Vonnegut not only became a stock market investor, but a shareholder in Dow Chemical which, Shields points out, was the sole manufacturer of napalm in the Vietnam War. It is part of Shields' research effort to illuminate his subject's private persona, then compare and contrast that to his public image - if only to show that most of the time, public expectations are at odds with a subject's private behavior. In that, Kurt Vonnegut was no exception. There are two major wonders in this book: 1. How did Vonnegut, not only a heavy smoker, but a smoker of Pall Mall, an unfiltered cigarette, live to the ripe old age of 85? 2. How is it that at page 350 in a 400 page book, we are only up to 1982 with the publication of Vonnegut's novel Dead Eye Dick? That is to say, how can the remaining 25 years of Vonnegut's life warrant a tad more than 50 pages? This second question is answered by Vonnegut himself. "We all see our lives as stories...if a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is." Unless you are Kurt Vonnegut. Many would be satisfied to have their entire life distilled down to the career he had after age 60. He produced the best seller Hocus Pocus in 1990 at the age of 68. Showtime adapted three of his short stories for network TV in 1991. Nick Nolte starred in a 1996 film adaptation of Mother Night. A collection of his speeches and essays appeared in 2005 as A Man Without A Country, which spent several weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An impressive first biography of a great American writer, November 9, 2011
This review is from: And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Hardcover)
Though I was one of the young folks enthralled by Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and much more of Vonnegut's work, I really didn't know much about the man, his family, and his life--except for his youthful Army service and horrifying experiences as a POW after the Allied firebombing of Dresden. Charles Shields, who wrote the first substantive biography of Harper Lee, corresponded with Vonnegut, proposing a biography. Once he had convinced his subject--rightly--of his top-notch research skills, Vonnegut finally sent Shields a last illustrated postcard, this time captioned, "OK." Work had not progressed very far before Vonnegut tripped over his Lhasa Apso's leash, fell, and never regained consciousness, dying three weeks later in 2007. Perhaps what finally pushed Vonnegut to trust Shields was the fact that really had been no previous biography of this literary icon of the second half of the twentieth century, which rankled Vonnegut. If America had a one-man Grub Street, Vonnegut grubbed away there in West Barnstable on Cape Cod for some twenty years churning out dozens of short stories and a few novels, amid clouds of Pall Mall smoke, before Slaughterhouse-Five made him a bestselling author. It also conferred financial security where previously there had been none. In this freelance writer's life existed a neat division of labor: Kurt wrote, while his then-devoted first wife Jane did everything else, including taking in three young, orphaned nephews when his adored sister Alice died of cancer just a day after her husband perished in a railroad accident. In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut eagerly accepted a last-minute offer to teach at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. There, for the first time, he was a widely admired instructor and author in a community of fellow writers. When Vonnegut became besotted with a student, the other faculty members remained discreet; it was a while before Jane, joining him in Iowa City, found out about that indiscretion and those that followed. After twenty years, the marriage became severely strained--although Vonnegut saw no reason not to ask his estranged wife to continue handling the details of everyday life. She wisely refused. Although Jane and Kurt's children Mark, Edie, and Nannie, as well as the nephews who moved in with them, all appear to have been most forthcoming in multiple interviews, the book easily could have been doomed at the outset. Mark Vonnegut, his father's literary executor, refused to allow Shields to quote from Vonnegut's correspondence, insisting the letters "spoke for themselves." Shields demonstrated his great gift for paraphrasing the letters' contents in order to meet the burdensome legal requirements. In nearly two thousand references, the paraphrased letter content does not stick out from interview quotes in an obtrusive way. When Harper Lee declined to be interviewed for Mockingbird, Shields' biography, he acquired a whole new skill set--fortunately for us. One source who refused to speak to the author was Vonnegut's second wife, photographer/author Jill Krementz. Judging from the impressions of just about everyone in Vonnegut's circle of friends, family, and colleague, Krementz appears to be an opportunistic scalp-collector rather than a wife. Vonnegut was introduced into the higher echelons of New York litr'y circles before Krementz decided that her husband had outlived his usefulness. Though Vonnegut pursued divorce three times, he never followed through, and Krementz retaliated through infidelity and by doing virtually nothing to sweeten her husband's last years. This book engrossed me from the time I slipped it from its wrapping until I read the final pages. Bravo, Shields--again!
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
God Bless You, Mr. Shields, November 20, 2011
This review is from: And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Hardcover)
Kurt Vonnegut was such a dynamic cultural force after the publication of his 1969 masterpiece "Slaughterhouse-Five" that he equals Mark Twain in symbolizing what an "American humorist" should sound like. His books have had untold influence on their readers, and his death in 2007 left us all feeling a little lost without his decisive, winking voice to navigate us through the land-mines of post-Patriot Act American culture. Now, in "And So It Goes," Charles Shields lays bare the facts of the great man's life, to reveal a person at times at odds with his public persona but much richer than the "kooky old uncle" image that Vonnegut cultivated amongst his young fans. Vonnegut was the product of a proud German-American family in Indianapolis, where his father once managed to turn a building around without having to cut off the facilities such as electrcity and water. But his home life was one of emotional distance, where his father Kurt and mother Edith rarely showed their youngest child any affection. It was a pattern that he was doomed to repeat with his own children, once he and first wife Jane settled in Cape Cod so that he could work on becoming a professional writer. His experiences in the war (notably his survival during the bombing of Dresden) would influence much of his work, and indeed much of his life, as he struggled to make sense of the abject devestation that he had witnessed. The human carnage of war helped turn him into a critic of America's willingness to go to war in later conflicts (perhaps most outspokenly during the War in Iraq, when he was demonized by those on the right, as I recall). His work, branded "science fiction" and treated with disdain by serious literary critics, has since come to be seen as some of the finest American literature of the postwar era, but he was not above shopping himself to magazines that paid the most for stories. As Shields demonstrates, Vonnegut's life was far removed from the image of him as a kindly figure whose every pronouncement was profound. Kurt's first marriage, in which his wife did all the housework and raised their children in addition to those of his sister, ended unhappily in divorce, but his second marriage (to photojournalist Jill Krementz) was no less disasterous, and he ended up dying in the most mundane way possible, as the result of a fall suffered while going to walk his dog. His home life wasn't ideal, and he pursued women outside of marriage for comfort, including a longtime affair with a former student at one of his writing workshops. But Shields lets shine the trademark Vonnegut wit, through quotes from or attributed to his correspondence with a host of people over the course of his long life. What sadness there is that dominates the portrait is alleviated by lively discussions of Vonnegut's many novels (though, as a fan of "Breakfast of Champions," I wholeheartedly disagree with both Vonnegut's and Shields' assessment that it's not one of his best works). It is an important look at a man whose many flaws made for a rich and rewarding literary legacy, a chronicle of sorts of the ways in which mankind can destroy one another, but also a much-needed laugh in the face of madness, which is often times the best defense. Kurt Vonnegut, the man who wrote some of the best books of the past century, is gone now, and the legacy he left continues to inspire. It isn't a pretty story, but "And So It Goes" captures the essential truths about Vonnegut, the many contradictions that made him one of the seminal figures not just in American literature but also in American history.
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