Why do I like Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick so much? I don’t know. Apart from the fact that it’s funny, which I always like, I suspect I connect with the book’s fundamental idea of relationships, and the need people have for them. A recurrent theme in Vonnegut’s work.
And I love the fact that the brother and sister, when separated, call themselves, “Betty and Bobby Brown.” The idea is that together they are something special; apart they are common, unremarkable people. And lonely.
In the prologue, Vonnegut says of the book, “It is about what life feels like to me.”
He also says he calls it Slapstick because it is “grotesque, situational poetry,” much like the movies of Laurel and Hardy. Of them, he says:
The fundamental joke with Laurel and Hardy, it seems to me, was that they did their best with every test. They never failed to bargain in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.
Yes. Indeed they were.
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In our house, when I was young, I was the family member with the books. I had tons of them. When someone else in our family was looking for something to read, they would go to my room and borrow one.
I remember my mother once borrowed D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. She read it and hated it. Her comment? “Who talks like that? Real people don’t talk like that.”
It was some of the best literary criticism I’ve ever heard.
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One day my father stayed home from work with a bad cold. I came home from school late in the day and found him in his favourite chair, still wearing pajamas and robe, his hair still mussed with bed-head. He was laughing his head off.
He was reading Slapstick. He had tears in his eyes, he was laughing so hard. He looked up at me, shook the book in my direction and said, “This is the craziest damn thing I’ve ever read!”
More great literary criticism from one of my parents.
*
Vonnegut may have written better books–Mother Night and Slaughterhouse-Five come to mind–but they don’t have the charm that Slapstick has. It’s like Laurel and Hardy that way. Their movies weren’t grandiose. They weren’t Gone With the Wind. But they had charm.
Strangely, Vonnegut didn’t have a high opinion of this book. In another book, Palm Sunday, he grades his works and gives Slapstick a D. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought he must have done something seriously wrong artistically to have written something so ordinarily nice. So charming. Yet also grotesque.
Maybe. You never know.
I give it a much higher grade. At least an A. It’s one of the craziest damn things I’ve ever read.
(Note: This pseudo-review, more an appreciation mashed up with elements of memoir, is several years old. I read Slapstick in 1976, when it came out, and several times since. Somewhere between 1976 and today, August of 2018, this was written. My point is simply this: It’s an older piece.)
