Kurt Vonnegut is the Danny Kaye of American Letters, a world-famous jester whose sweet and zany style has never been sealed by the academy as the high art of a Chaplin or a Keaton, who continues over the years to swoop up devotees without shaking off disdainers. Palm Sunday is not likely to send deserters scrambling from either side….

Palm Sunday is "an autobiographical collage," a literary bag lady—not your run-of-the-street bag lady but a Mary Kathleen O'Looney. In Jailbird, O'Looney turns out to be president of RAMJAC, an international conglomerate that owns everything in the world. According to the copyright, RAMJAC owns Palm Sunday, too. Imagine that. And so on.

Vonnegut's last collage, the 1975 Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, wasn't autobiographical. Neither is this one, if readers are looking for Crack-Ups, or Capotean confessions of madder music and stronger wine, or even a chronology of the and-then-I-wrote-and-wed sort….

On Palm Sunday's circus-full of rigging, its author flies through airy nothingness with ease; he's done the routine for years. He opens with cheek. His tongue is in it: "This is a very great book by an American genius."… At any rate, Vonnegut has swept his desk clean. Shaken out are four essays, ten public speeches, two funeral orations of his own and one of his great-grandfather's, two letters of his own and one by his daughter to a disgruntled restaurant customer, an interview with himself for The Paris Review, an Andy Hardy musical skit on the Jekyll and Hyde theme, an alphabetical list of 400 writer "friends" he has met at least once for at least thirty seconds, accepted and rejected book introductions, lyrics to two Country-Western songs by the Statler Brothers. And on and on. So it goes.

Among the best things are proud and generous portraits of his six children…. Also a peek at the "unbridled happiness" of William F. Buckley Jr. Also a talk of earnest irony to a New Jersey Mental Health Association. Also addresses at colleges … where he speaks with a voice marvelously attuned to the counterpoint of gloom, silliness and righteous fervor humming away in adolescents….

[It] was Vonnegut who brought [the science fiction] genre from outer space into a mainstream literary orbit by adding his style of black comedy and Bokononian commentary—a sort of Jonathan Livingston Spaceship with Lenny Bruce at the controls….

Like Heller and other of his Depression-raised, World War II-graduated peers, Vonnegut began writing in the 1950s but became popularly associated with a "radical 1960s" sensibility. He tells us in Palm Sunday that these liberal beliefs, deeply felt but not doctrinaire, are "so soft and complicated they turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush" when he argues against folks like, say, William F. Buckley Jr. Nonetheless, Vonnegut carries that banner for his readers; they know that if they open a book of his, they will find cherished flags still flying….

Vonnegut is a popular writer; there is nothing obscure about his style or abstruse about his themes; you can read one of his books in an evening. While he splatters orthodox notions of the novel, his works have little to do with modernist "fictiveness"—compare the index to Jailbird with Nabokov's for Pale Fire; compare Pynchon's allegorial polysemy with Vonnegut's Humpty-Dumpty neologisms. (p. 346)

Palm Sunday he calls "a confrontation between an American novelist and his own stubborn simplicity." He's conflicted about that quality's merit. At times he concludes he's not very educated, not very articulate, in fact not very bright and not very polished at his craft. At other times he wants us to know that his "mosaics of jokes" are highly skilled artifact (as indeed they are) of a fine natural talent for whom writing came as easily "as falling off a log." To write simply, and not shallowly, like Vonnegut at his best—like Mark Twain, the idol for whom he named his first son and whom he is oddly coming even to resemble, with his curls and drooping mustache—to achieve so clean a simplicity is no slight accomplishment. (pp. 346-47)

Vonnegut says he shares Twain's bitter skepticism—"that I have had it right all along, that I will not see God, that there is no heaven." Meanwhile, he keeps hoping we can create a new one here on earth, based on that most radical of ideological documents, the Sermon on the Mount. Palm Sunday ends with a sermon on that Sermon by a modest, polite, sentimental family man, a planetary patriot and a writer to whose stubborn simplicity the modern American novel owes great thanks. (p. 347)