[The] novel must cease taking itself seriously or perish…. Vonnegut has had what we now realize to be an advantage in this regard, since he began as a Pop writer, the author of "slick" fiction, written to earn money, which is to say, to fit formulas which are often genuine myths, frozen and waiting to be released. Fortunately, though he has sometimes written to suit the tastes of the middle-aged ladies who constitute the readership of the Ladies' Home Journal, he has tended more to exploit the mythology of the future. But he has, in any case—as writers of, rather than about, mythology must—written books that are thin and wide, rather than deep and narrow, books which open out into fantasy and magic by means of linear narration rather than deep analysis; and so happen on wisdom, fall into it through grace, rather than pursue it doggedly or seek to earn it by hard work. Moreover, like all literature which tries to close the gap between the elite and the popular audiences rather than to confirm it, Vonnegut's books tend to temper irony with sentimentality and to dissolve both in wonder….

Vonnegut does belong to what we know again to be the mainstream of fiction; it is not the mainstream of High Art, however, but of myth and entertainment: a stream which was forced to flow underground over the past several decades, but has now surfaced once more. (p. 196)

[Player Piano,] despite its projection into the future and its science-fiction gimmicks,… represented quite obviously the kind of earnest social criticism which suggests comparisons with quite respectable writers like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. In its earlier pages especially, it seems now, in fact, too bent on suggesting such comparisons, more committed to morality than play, more concerned with editorial than invention; grimly intent on proving (once more!) that machines deball and dehumanize men—and that the huge corporation, called the Ilium Works … corrupts those it nominates as an elite even as it strips of all dignity those it finds unworthy to program its computers. But before Player Piano is through. Vonnegut's sense of humor has mitigated his indignation, and he is pursuing … any possibility of a joke, no matter how poor or in the midst of no matter what horror: anticipating, in fact, the mode later called, ineptly enough, "Black Humor."…

Vonnegut is at his best in the book when he himself indulges in Pop fantasy—anticipating what he can do best as he invents the Ghost Shirt Society…. (p. 199)

[In The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle] he seems at ease—in a way he was not earlier and would not be later—with science fiction; finding in its conventions not a kind of restriction, but a way of releasing his own sentimental-ironic view of a meaningless universe redeemed by love; his own unrecognized need to write a New Gospel or at least to rewrite the Old; his distrusted longing to indulge his fantasy without providing the unimaginative one more occasion for idle masturbation; his unconfessed desire to escape both the stifling inwardness of the traditional art-novel and the empty virtuosity of avant-garde experiment….

[Reading] them, we are not tempted to believe ourselves set apart by the rareness of our pleasure or the subtlety of our understanding. Like all Pop art, they confirm our solidarity with everyone who can read at all, or merely dream over pages devoted to evoking the mystery of space and time, or to prophesying the end of man.

[Mother Night] temporarily interrupts Vonnegut's continuing exploration of the potentialities of science fiction—representing perhaps a desire to be more immediately topical, more directly political, more "serious" in short. It is not unsuccessful in its own terms, but finally irrelevant to Vonnegut's special vocation, though deeply concerned with Germany and World War II, which is Vonnegut's other obsessive subject matter: the past he remembers, rather than the future he extrapolates or invents. Mother Night does not quite manage to deal with the American firebombing of Dresden…. [He came] closer in Slaughterhouse-Five; but even that novel is less about Dresden than about Vonnegut's failure to come to terms with it—one of those beautifully frustrating works about their own impossibility….

Eschewing science fiction in Mother Night, however, Vonnegut turns to another, more established Pop form, the spy novel…. The story itself is, however, serious enough; the tale of a double agent, unable to prove for a long time that he was really in the pay of the U.S. Government and unwilling, finally, to save himself from hanging when that proof is unexpectedly offered. Self-condemned and self-executed, Howard W. Campbell leaves behind a book intended to testify that one is always—hopelessly, irrecoverably—what he pretends to be, pretends to himself he is only pretending to be.

Campbell is, in fact, the first major author-protagonist in Vonnegut; and, like his own author, a Pop artist before history makes him an autobiographer. He has become for the large German public a successful playwright; and for the smaller public of two, constituted by himself and his wife, a private pornographer….

[Vonnegut] is especially hung up on the subject of porn, the sole Pop form which, in fact, evades him—despite a theoretical dedication to freeing men to lead full sexual lives. Vonnegut cannot ever quite manage to talk dirty enough to be explicit about sex; though (because?) he is haunted throughout his work by a vision of his own books ending up in the display windows of pornographic bookshops, confused by owners and customers alike with hard-core pornography. He is aware really that the confusion is, on the deepest level, somehow valid; that the best of science fiction has in common with the shabbiest sort of erotica, not sex but "fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world."

But he is not really at ease with the fact; and throughout his work, especially as it grows more and more unguardedly confessional, there appears over and over the image of that first of all pornographic photos, in which a girl is vainly trying to screw a Shetland pony….

Yet what bugs Vonnegut even more is the awareness that in his own time pornography is practiced, and accepted, as revolutionary art itself, a special way of telling the truth about the society we live in; and he parodies mercilessly, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a novelist presumably dedicated to absolute candor…. (p. 200)

In the end, however, the spy novel proved for Vonnegut almost as unsympathetic as pornography itself—more unsympathetic, in fact, since the story of espionage posits a world of total alienation rather than one of impossible hospitality. He could not find room in it, moreover, for magic and wonder, the religious dimension so necessary to his view of man. (pp. 200, 202)

The Sirens of Titan is his best book, I think—most totally achieved, most nearly dreamed rather than contrived. In it, he evokes all the themes, along with their sustaining images, for which we remember him with special affection and amusement: the unreality of time and the consequent possibility of traveling therein, the illusory nature of free will and the consequent possibility of heroism and sacrifice, the impossibility of really choosing one's mate and the consequent necessity to love whomever, whatever happens to come to hand. It is, moreover, his most chutzpahdik, his most outrageously and attractively arrogant book, for in it he dares not only to ask the ultimate question about the meaning of human life, but to answer it.

But what sets The Sirens of Titan apart is that, inventing it, Vonnegut has escaped from the limitations of an imagination narrower and more provincial than it is ever possible quite to remember. Despite his dedication to a form predicated on space-travel, Vonnegut is oddly earth-bound, American-bound…. In The Sirens of Titan, however, he imagined for the first time Tralfamadore, the transgalactic world he is to evoke again and again, but to which none of his space-travelers even actually go; until, perhaps, Billy Pilgrim …, and which we are free, therefore, to understand for the absolute Elsewhere, more easily reached by art or madness than by mere technology. (p. 202)

This is not, however, the work's final word, Vonnegut's final position: for that very messenger, it turns out, though an intricate machine, has learned somehow to love in the aeons he has spent as a castaway; and he provides—like a kindly Pop artist—a vision of Paradise to sustain Malachi's dying moments; a false vision sustained by posthypnotic suggesting, but sufficient to make dying more palatable than living. It is as much of a Happy Ending as Kurt Vonnegut could imagine at this point in his career. (pp. 202-03)

[Cat's Cradle] does not even offer us [a] token Happy Ending, for that book begins and ends with a vision of the total destruction of mankind, to which only an eternal gesture of contempt is an adequate response. It is a book which has nothing to do with Heaven except insofar as it is not there ("No cat! No cradle!"), though it takes place largely on an island paradise in the Caribbean, which stirs in us once more memories of that Master of Illusion, Prospero….

Indeed, the not-quite nihilism of the book's close is a product of the tension between the religion of Bokononism, which advocates formulating and believing sacred lies, and the vision granted to the dwarfed son of the Father of the Bomb of the emptiness behind all lies, however sacred. The voice of the White Dwarf and the Black Prophet are both Vonnegut's, and they answer each other inconclusively throughout; creating an ambiguity quite like that produced by the opposite claims of High Art (the Dwarf, an avantgarde painter, renders his view in monochrome abstraction) and Pop Art (Bokonon, an entertainer, sings his creed in calypso form).

But, as ever in Vonnegut, something more is presented than the unresolvable conflict of mutually exclusive theories: namely, the possibility of actual joy. John, at any rate, is revealed as having experienced two great joys before his tale is told: one slow and long-continued, as he learns who are the other members of his karass, the handful of others in the world with whom, willy-nilly, he must work out the pattern of his destiny: one intense and momentary, as he plays footsie with the blonde Negress, Mona, whom he, and everyone else, loves….

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater … and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) … constitute, in fact, a single work, with common characters, common themes, common obsessions and a common whimsy—and which together rifle his earlier books for other characters, themes, obsessions and whimsical asides; as if he is being driven to make his total work seem in retrospect a latter-day Human Comedy or Yoknapatawpha series. But [these] last novels are quite different in their tone and effect, being essentially autobiographical rather than mythic: quasi-novels really, in which the author returns to his early material reflectively rather than obsessively—and so ends writing about it, rather than simply writing it…. (p. 203)

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is not science fiction at all … but a work of "mainstream literature," in which Vonnegut has transposed from the Future and Elsewhere to the Present and Right Here the themes which he once mythologized in popular, fantastic modes: the compelling need to love the unlovable, whose ranks industrialization has disconcertingly swelled; the magical power of money and the holy folly of renouncing it; the uses and abuses of fantasy itself. But the profoundest and most central concern of Rosewater is new for Vonnegut…. We remember the novel chiefly as a book about madness, or more particularly, as one about the relationship between madness and holiness; since Eliot Rosewater … is the first of Vonnegut's gurus who lives in madness rather than by lies. He does not, that is to say, choose deliberately to deceive for the sake of the salvation of mankind, but is hopelessly self-deceived: insane enough to accept as truth what Rumfoord was forced to justify as useful fictions, or Bokonon to preach as foma, "harmless untruths."

But if God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is not science fiction, it is compulsively about science fiction; and this time the writer nearest to its center … is Kilgore Trout, the author of scores of neglected and despised science fiction novels….

[It] is given to Trout to play an equivocal St. Paul to Eliot Rosewater's absurd Christ: to rationalize Eliot's madness in terms acceptable even to his tycoon father….

[In] Slaughterhouse-Five, Trout returns to play a similar role for a similar sub-messiah, this time an optometrist called Billy Pilgrim, who had, as a matter of fact, been introduced to the work of Trout by Eliot himself in the psycho-ward of a military hospital during World War II.

But Billy, unlike Eliot, travels in space and time, actually reaching Tralfamadore itself…. Oddly enough, however—as Vonnegut pointedly informs us—Trout had already imagined the zoo episode in fiction, and Billy had read it before living it, or dreaming it, or falling through time and space into it. Vonnegut will not, to be sure, let us side with the cynics and realists who would, by psychiatric means, cure Billy of his belief that he has been and is forever on Tralfamadore; but he leaves suspended, not quite asked, much less answered, the question of whether he travels there through Outer Space or Inner, via madness or flying saucer—or merely by means of Pop fiction, in which each of these is revealed as the metaphor of the other….

And if at last Vonnegut does not understand, all the better for him and for us. What he does not understand is precisely what saves him for readers like me who are disconcerted and dismayed as he grows more and more conscious of more and more in himself, turns more and more from fantasy to analysis. (p. 204)

Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut," in Esquire (first published in Esquire Magazine; copyright © 1970 by Esquire, Inc.), in Esquire, September, 1970, pp. 195-204.