In 1975 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of reviews, articles and speeches under the annoying title of Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Now, six years later, he has done much the same in Palm Sunday. He calls the book a collage…. The result is far more effective than the earlier book. Indeed were it not for the 'connective tissue' Palm Sunday would be dangerously inconclusive and slight…. [Some] of the pieces included here are clearly no more than padding. There can be no other reason for reprinting his short story 'The Big Space Fuck' or subjecting us to a truly appalling libretto for a musical version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—which the producers quite rightly turned down. It is Vonnegut's musings and speculations on and around the circumstances that prompted this or that address or introduction to a book that prove in the end to be far and away the most rewarding elements of Palm Sunday. They do, as he intended, form a partial autobiography—a 'sort of life'—which reveals the author to us in a genial and unself-conscious way and raises hope that this will prove to be a trial run for a fuller, longer account of his life. (p. 84)

[Beneath] the mannerisms lies an amenable personality whose opinions are not without merit and relevance. Vonnegut's bêtes noires are worthy and well known and include such targets as multinationals, pollution, organized religion, war and inhumanity. If a new note appears in Palm Sunday then it's a plea to abandon the nuclear family and to return to the extended one…. This particular direction of Vonnegut's thought seems to have been caused by the breakdown of his twenty-year-old marriage and the dispersal of his six children. (p. 85)

Vonnegut may or may not be like the portrait he presents of himself here. The point is that he has found his voice and it informs and colours the moderately interesting facts and tendentious opinions in a beguiling and sympathetic way. When talking about Thoreau, Vonnegut observes that 'Thoreau, I now feel, wrote in the voice of a child, as I do.' That is Vonnegut's voice, his particular imposture, and, like any child, its pronouncements can be maddening or inspiringly perceptive. There are enough of the latter to make us hope for more in the future. (p. 86)