Kurt Vonnegut—public clown, master of disguises, wizard of the ironic approach, self-parodist, sender-up of his self-sending-up—gives the reader of Palm Sunday plenty of warning. Writing, he says, is playing practical jokes on readers: "If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes."…

["Somebody thought" is] the sort of response Palm Sunday engagingly invites to its offered collage of bits and pieces. But the presence of irony is a great mongerer of scepticism, especially when it's signalled so loudly….

Vonnegut busily undoes his own book, calling it a blivit ("two pounds of shit in a one pound bag"), mocking it as he mocks the excesses of American authors' immodesties ("This is a very great book by an American genius. I have worked so hard on this masterpiece for the past six years…. It is a marvelous new literary form …"). He slings dauntingly low blows at himself as the only true beneficiary of Dresden's bombing….

Vonnegut, in fact, spends a lot of his time blackly glooming: about his failed first marriage, about becoming "an old poop" …, about the proneness of his women-folk to religious superstition, about illiberalism and violence in America and the world. Going in for jokes, Vonnegut alleges, would do a lot of good to all those long-winded American novelists who believe bulky seriousness the mark of greatness. For jokes put ideas shortly. But pose though he strenuously does as just the hired jester who makes happily snappy shrift of your fund-raising or your commencement ceremonies, in practice Vonnegut is himself as lengthily serious as any of the co-fictionists he derides. Again and again he comes round to the importance of not believing in God or playing divinities or putting faith in technology/nukes/the military. He repeatedly restates the need to fight America's Number One Killer, loneliness, and to uphold the First Amendment's visions of an America of free opinions and speech, where all the Funny Guts can speak or write or draw assholes as and whenever the spirit so moves them….

Vonnegut refuses to unite … the contraries that meet in his prose. Dutiful descendant of German immigrants that he is, he keeps trying to work out the identity of America, and his own identity as a German-American. "Fellow Americans", "we Americans", "American literature", "most Americans" …: Americanness is much on his mind. But he can't ever quite make up his mind about whether America is free or not. He sounds sincere when he praises America's bold First Amendment, America's system of laws, its free enterprise, its realization of utopian dreams. He sounds equally sincere when lamenting the failures of American freedoms—Jefferson's slaves, Sacco and Vanzetti, the legal attempts to stop him from being "free to discuss" some naughty thing.