Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, by Kurt Vonnegut

It seems appropriate nowadays, what with recent events at the height of American politics, to read a tale about a crackpot American president who aims to change the world. Kurt Vonnegut’s usual sardonic wit and taste for the vulgar finds its home in this story about loneliness and genius, set amidst the backdrop of a fairly weird apocalypse – and as usual with Kurt Vonnegut, I love every word of it. Slapstick, or Lonesome No More, is a strange and beautiful little novel.

          The premise of the story is just as bonkers as they always are from this author. A one hundred year old man in a desolate near unpopulated future Manhattan is writing his memoirs,
revealing that he was once President of the United States, and that his name is Dr Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain. Born with a twin sister, Eliza, to immensely wealthy philanthropic parents, the two infants were grotesquely deformed and given poor odds for survival past childhood. The parents decide to have their twin children kept detained in a renovated ancestral manor, denied all contact with the outside world, where they could be looked after by a dedicated staff until the children eventually succumbed to whatever mortality the doctors had predicted. Unbeknownst to the parents, Wilbur and Eliza Swain are in fact incredibly intelligent, and whilst pretending to be intellectually disabled around the staff of their private care home and their parents, by night the twins explore the mansion, digest the vast library they have access to, and concoct brilliant theories about how to improve the world. Once their true nature is revealed to their parents, Wilbur is permitted to go into the outside world for the first time, but at a serious cost. Separation from his sister. Eliza, being unable to read or write, despite her vast intellect, is deemed to be unfit for society and is kept locked away while her brother - who admits that he is far less intelligent, but is able to read and write - is allowed to go to school and then university. Eventually he becomes a doctor of medicine, while Eliza is confined to a mental institution.

          After Eliza’s death many years later, Wilbur doses himself up on medical drugs and decides to run for president, with one campaign promise: to give everybody in the country a new middle name, selected at random from a predesigned list. The outcome would be that anybody who

shared your new middle name would become an artificial relative, and therefore a vast new network of random extended families would be set up, and nobody would need to be lonely again. Unfortunately, despite the project’s apparent success, during Wilbur’s second term in office most of humanity is wiped out by disease, and he is left to travel the desolate nation he once tried to improve. 

          The story is as madcap as you can expect anything from Vonnegut to be. Whatever allegories or deeper messages you may wish to draw from the narrative require very little work. It’s written in black and white. The usual Vonnegutian writing-style of broad story-book level prose conveying the bleakest humour possible is here at its best example, to the extent that I’m certain a child could read it and understand what it was on about. As usual there are no science-fiction elements that actually have a great bearing on the story; unless you count the tangential side-story that China has closed its borders and is focusing on breeding their people to miniscule size and pushing technological progress beyond anything the rest of the world could imagine. The story is about a bizarre social experiment brought about by a unique individual, not science as such.

          The humour is bleak and dark, as you would expect. Much of this really won’t have you

laughing, and there’s not really what you would call wit underpinning the writing. The very name, Slapstick, could be a description of the type of comedy Vonnegut aims to emulate – yet it seems as though he’s being a tad more satirical than this, implying that life itself is slapstick comedy. Vonnegut’s humour is more along the vein of ‘hey, look at how horribly wrong things have ended up. We might as well laugh or we’ll end up just wanting to die.’ Christ, why would anybody want to read that? Why do I enjoy it so much? Sometimes it is quite funny, such as when Wilbur becomes hooked on ‘tri-benzo-Doportamil’, a drug actually intended to treat victims of Tourette’s syndrome. After never considering going into politics before, he baldly states:

          ‘And time flew. Time was a blurry bird now – made indistinct by ever-increasing dosages of tri-benzo-Deportamil.

***

Somewhere in there, I closed my hospital, gave up medicine entirely, and was elected United States Senator from Vermont.

          And time flew.

          I found myself running for President one day.’    

                                                [Vonnegut, Vintage, pg. 111. (2008)]

          Most of the time it’s just dark and depressing. Vonnegut’s stories are inevitably about all the ways in which broken humans can be horrible to one-another, boiled down to its leanest, simplest language. Slapstick is a damned short novel, and can be read in a weekend or less. As a story it’s morbid, but not in the way that makes you feel sick to be alive such as some of Vonnegut’s other works. It’s just a dark little tale about how a damaged person tried out a new idea for running the world and ended up destroying America.

          But it’s time to mention the best part of this work. As with Slaughterhouse Five, Slapstick begins with a fairly substantial little prologue from the mouth of the writer himself, explaining in a very roundabout way how and why he came to write this novel. Unlike Slaughterhouse Five, which Vonnegut tried over and over to write and couldn’t get it right, but still needing it to be written, this one is just an idea he had on a plane whilst travelling to attend his uncle’s funeral, of a story about his strange interpretation of relationships and his dead sister, Alice. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I sincerely wish that the entire novel had just been like this; with Kurt Vonnegut just talking to us about whatever happens to be in his head. It makes the subsequent story feel like a weird little afterthought. Vonnegut’s writing is so clear, so cutting, so poignant, that it feels almost mocking that he wrote the actual book the way he did. I felt this way about Slaughterhouse Five as well. When discussing the death of his uncle, he says:
        'I received the news of his death over a white, push-button telephone in my house in that part of Manhattan known as 'Turtle Bay'. There was a philodendron nearby.
        I am still not clear how I got here. There are no turtles. There is no bay.
        Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.'

                          [Vonnegut, Vintage, pg. 7. (2008)]
           His writing is so measured, light as air, and tangential. You could read his stuff for hours.

So this is a fairly all right piece of Vonnegut. It’s a slightly more coherent story than some of his other novels – which admittedly isn’t saying much – and the humour is as bleak as ever. It made me laugh, and it made me question life, which is what you can hope for from this writer. It’s not one of my favourites from Vonnegut, but I’m sure it’ll stick with me for some time to come, as all his works inevitably do. Whatever you do, if you’re actually reading this, I can only say that of all the people who have ever put words on paper for any reason, Kurt Vonnegut is one to single out and experience for yourself.

Bibliosome

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slapstick or Lonesome No More. Vintage. (2008 [First Published 1976])