And So It Goes

Starred review from August 1, 2011
Vonnegut initially refused to grant an interview to Shields (author of the bestselling Mockingbird), but then relented, enabling Shields to meet him during the last months of his life. This first authorized biography probes both Vonnegut's creative struggles and family life, detailing his transition from "the bowery of the book world" to counterculture icon. Shields delivers a vivid recreation of Vonnegut's ghastly WWII experiences as a POW during the Dresden firebombing that became the basis for Slaughterhouse-Five; the novel brought him overnight fame when it was serialized in Ramparts magazine and then published in a month when 453 Americans were killed in Vietnam. Tragedies and triumphs are contrasted throughout, along with an adroit literary analysis that highlights obscure or overlooked influences on Vonnegut: Ambrose Bierce, Céline, Robert Coover's metafiction, and Paul Rhymer, who scripted radio's Vic and Sade. With access to more than 1,500 letters, Shields conducted hundreds of interviews to produce this engrossing, definitive biography. It arrives during a year of renewed interest in Vonnegut, such as this year's Library of America's Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963â1973, and Gregory D. Sumner's Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels, also due in Nov.

October 15, 2011
The life of a once-lionized writer who is gradually, it seems, being forgotten today. "We are what we pretend to be," wrote Vonnegut in his novel Mother Night, "so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Vonnegut didn't pretend to be much, preferring to let others invent roles for him, such as shaggy-haired dispenser of goofy wisdom or the dark chronicler of the gloom and doom that technology and consumerism would one day visit upon us all. One has to feel some pity for Shields (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, 2006, etc.), who began this biography with Vonnegut's blessing; alas, Vonnegut died as Shields was beginning to work, and Vonnegut's widow and son deauthorized the book, refusing to allow Shields to quote directly from a body of 258 letters that Shields himself had "received from his correspondents." The result is a slightly choppy piece, though the main threads will be familiar to readers of Vonnegut's work. For one thing, he was a moralist through and through--and a self-aware one who noted, "People are constantly demanding moralizing…that's certainly what people want to hear when they ask me to lecture." For another, Vonnegut quite deliberately chose the vehicle of science fiction to warn about the dangers of science--though, as Shields' book illuminates, at least some of Vonnegut's distaste for technology was a reaction to a brother with whom he had lifelong issues. Though guilty of unnecessarily overwritten passages, Shields is a sympathetic and responsive reader of Vonnegut's work, which deserves to be taken seriously even when so often dismissed as literary pranksterism, and even though the last couple of decades of it frankly wasn't very good. The author also cuts Vonnegut some of the necessary slack, since to be a writer by definition is to be a selfish and peevish being--and so Vonnegut was. Indeed, Vonnegut emerges as irascible, ungenerous and usually unkind, "flinty, defensive, and sarcastic," which will surely disappoint admirers who wanted him to be something better.

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September 1, 2011

Shields (Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee) presents a semiauthorized biography: Vonnegut agreed to cooperate but then died within a year, four years before this publication. However, the book demonstrates thorough research, based on interviews, letters, emails, and critical evaluations of Vonnegut's writings, all cited extensively. While many are familiar with some of Vonnegut's novels, fewer know his personal history. Shields takes us from cradle to grave, an interesting journey to say the least, stressing that his role is to look for patterns of behavior. One pattern he frequently notes is the difference between Vonnegut's authorial voice and ideas and the person himself. While Shields is clearly a fan, he does not shy away from discussing the more difficult aspects of Vonnegut's personality or from criticizing the novels. His device of starting the biography right in the midst of things, only to return to the early years, seems a bit forced, but, that aside, he keeps readers engrossed in the unfolding. VERDICT An excellent choice particularly for those who have read Vonnegut and will now understand the sources of the ideas he espouses in his novels and be able to contrast them with the actual person. [See Prepub Alert, 5/9/11.]--Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences, Philadelphia

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2011
After the Depression blasted his wealthy Indianapolis family, Kurt Vonnegut goofed his way out of college and into the WWII infantry. Captured in the Battle of the Bulge, he became a POW survivor of the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, which he thought would be his great subject as a writer. He married, had a three-kid family to which his sister's death (two days after her husband's) added four more, made a precarious living writing short stories, and produced four novels through which his genuine big themethe senselessness of violence and humanity's persistent inability to quit indulging in itbecame clear to him. His fifth novel, his Dresden book, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), became a huge best-seller, hoisted its predecessors out of the red, ensured its successors' success, and made a celebrity out of him. Shields, whose Mockingbird (2006) limned Harper Lee, traces Vonnegut's literary trajectory and his less-than-idyllic early family life, tempestuous marriages, and Janus-faced characterhalf hopefully fatalistic evangelist for kindness; half selfish, emotionally distant friend, father, and lover. Shields doesn't much critique Vonnegut's work but, thanks to access to his subject and those who knew him best (not including his second wife, certainly the villain of the book), offers a full extraliterary portrait.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)