Centerfield

No More Bitter-Coated Sugar Pills

Kurt Vonnegut has died. I am a big fan, and read much of his work. I was always taken by one critic's desription of his work as bitter-coated sugar pills. Which struck me as exactly so.

No More Bittter-Coated Sugar Pills

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view. He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."

He will be missed. He had a Twainesque acerbic quality sorely missing in much of modern writing. As Twain once said, a patriot supports his country always and his government when it deserves it. Vonnegut knew this, and while he always saw the dark side, he knew there could be sweet. If anyone decides to pick up some of his work but has already read some of the more celebrated stuff (Shaughterhouse 5 is brilliant, IMO). check out his first, Player Piano. Interesting premise, especially in that day,that the world would get more and more automated and free us from work, but that we might not like that.