"Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage" [is] a race down to the wire between the good stuff and the bad stuff, in which the good stuff wins by a nose.

One of the drawbacks to a collection of this sort is that it requires the use of material in which certain gags are repeated. This gets to be such a habit in "Palm Sunday" that Mr. Vonnegut starts repeating himself even when he doesn't have to….

The other drawback to "Palm Sunday" is Mr. Vonnegut's charm. The main ingredient of this charm is a facility for saying it before you can, for calling "Palm Sunday" a "blivet" before you can call it a piece of junk, of giving it a C on the report card of his life's work before you can give it a C-,… or of saying he feels guilty about having profited from the bombing of Dresden before you can accuse him of being two-faced for having published … a letter he told the recipient no one else would see.

This part of his charm is innocence achieved by pre-emptive guilt. The other parts are an elaborate ability to say, "Aw shucks," and an almost infinite capacity to appear less holy than thou. Sometimes the charm wears a little thick. You want to say, If you feel guilty about Dresden, why don't you give some of your money to it? Also, like many agnostics, Mr. Vonnegut talks too much about God.

But the good things outweigh the bad in "Palm Sunday."… The best things are the questions and answers he supplied for a Paris Review "Writers at Work" interview, a speech he gave to the Mental Health Association in New Jersey and the sermon "Palm Sunday," delivered at St. Clement's Church in New York, in which he explains what Jesus might really have meant when he said to Judas, "For the poor always ye have with you; but you do not always have me."

There is little more to say after all this time about what Mr. Vonnegut does so well. It's all been described before—the clarity and simplicity of phrase, the perfect sense of timing, the funny incongruity and the shrewd sense of idiom. He is, at his very best, fit company for his idol, Mark Twain.