After an adulthood avoiding Kurt Vonnegut, I finally read Cat’s Cradle. I immediately wondered what had been wrong with me to avoid Vonnegut. Cat’s Cradle is written in clear, straightforward prose with short, snappy sentences and paragraphs. It’s a little strange and the science fiction part of it is just a little science-y and a bit more satire. Vonnegut has a dry sense of humor (which we’ll talk more about in a minute) that not so much shines as glares light on humanity while dealing with the big questions of his day and all the days. It is very Cold War, but it’s also full of things and people and issues we recognize today. And then, dear reader, you have fun reading it.

Synopsis: Felix Hoenikker is one of the eccentric geniuses behind the atom bomb. He also invented a little thing called “ice-nine” before he died, and John, an aimless reporter, is interested in this fact. He follows the trail of ice-nine after Hoenikker’s three, bizarre children, out to a tropical island and into the heart of a despotic regime and an illegal religion. If ice-nine is there—if ice-nine is anywhere—it could mean the end of the world.

I said I would talk again about his wry sense of humor. Here’s the thing, I did read this book for a book club. But I also read it because when I was I had a manuscript session at a writing residency this past spring, the author giving me feedback told me my humor was similar to Vonnegut’s, as were maybe some other things (I tend to be a keen observer who writes with my tongue in my cheek), and I should read his works. So I was at first surprised, but then happy to start here.

I did not find this book nihilist or even particularly pessimistic. Just satirical. Existentialist. But existential despair? More existential absurdist. Which hopefully shows you that I did not nail the description of the book above. Those are the bare bones of the story, but the voice of Vonnegut is what carries anything about it.

And Vonnegut was a Humanist. (“Famously” a Humanist, as one person in my book club kept saying.) According to Google, Humanism is “an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to humans rather than divine or supernatural matters” …. “stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.” Yeah, that totally checks out. These ideas are all over this book, right there with the Cold War question of “Are they going to push the button?” You could also call it irreverence. Or sacrilege. It’s kinda all three.

The moral I got from it was also that one bad apple… you know. And that bad apple’s existence is inevitable. I mean, eventually one of the many bad apples is going to get some real power… Also, who has power? And what accidents have we already set in motion? It’s a war-minded, sci fi, postmodern story on the verge of being postapocalyptic, inspired by the beat poets. I thought it was going to be bizarro, but it ended up feeling homey, fun, and magical to me. Even if it was kinda sad in its commentary and events. Like a sad circus, a bit.

John, the narrator… well, we only hear his name on the first page. He is totally in this story and there are even moments when his actions matter, but for the most part he is a non-entity narrator. He is a mirror. He is made of glass. He is see-through, like a ghost. He is more of an observer, and a bland observer at that, especially compared to all the other characters. But this felt intentional, right.

PS. According to a physicist (or two) in my book club, there is a real ice-nine. But this is a fictionalized version of ice-nine, much more stable and dramatic. The physicist muttered, “It would have made more sense to say it was ice-thirteen, actually…”

PS2. There is a Moby Dick reference at the very beginning.

As a co-reader said at club, “The book ends when he finds his purpose—not when he carries it out.” Which is another way of saying that some people will wish Vonnegut had written more at the end. I was good with it. Though I do agree the ending felt fast. Then again, the whole thing felt fast. It’s not a long read. It’s a classic. I enjoyed it. I can’t believe a lot of Vonnegut’s work is out of print.

Some recommended reads to go along with this one would be White Noise by Don Delillo and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was a prolific, popular, and lauded writer of wry, satirical, humanist-fatalist speculative fiction short stories and novels. He was from Indianapolis, where he grew up affluent in a successful family until Prohibition and The Depression plunged them into poverty and struggle. He went to Cornell and majored in biochem before poor grades led him to enlist in the draft. After his mother committed suicide (struggling with alcohol and prescription drugs), he left for WWII, where he was taken prisoner by the Germans.

When he returned, he went to University of Chicago for a graduate degree in anthropology, was married to his high school sweetheart, and became a journalist. He couldn’t handle working in PR in upstate New York, so he became a writer of fiction in Cape Cod (despite mostly rejection) and had six kids. His first short stories were science fiction, as were his first novels, a few years later.

He didn’t like the label “science fiction,” but wrote about technology and humanity, at least at first. He developed his wry, satirical style as well as his fictional alter ego, Kilgore Trout. His popularity grew with Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five (about his experience in the war and his breakthrough novel, named after him surviving the bombing of Dresden in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was held).

His wife converted to Christianity and their marriage couldn’t survive the strain of their differing worldviews, though they remained friends. He married again later and adopted a seventh child. He suffered from depression and attempted suicide in 1984. He also published other novels, plays, collections of short stories, and collections of essays, even political nonfiction. There is a Memorial Library in Indianapolis devoted to him and his work.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you” (p11).

“Why would I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?” (p11).

“Dr. Hoeknikker used to say that any scientist who couldn’t explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan” (p34).

“New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become” (p41).

“Bokonon says” ‘Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God’” (p63).

“’Life is sure funny sometimes.’ / ‘And sometimes it isn’t.’ said Marvin Breed” (p66).

“They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by” (p86).

“’Americans,’ he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, ‘”are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier”’” (p97).

“…Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from the penalty” (p98).

“She broke my heart. I didn’t like that much. But that was the price. In this world, you get what you pay for” (p128).

“If you want an expert opinion, money doesn’t necessarily make people happy” (p152).

“So I said goodbye to government, / And I gave my reason: / That a really good religion / Is a form of treason” (p173).

“’Maturity, the way I understand it,’ he told me, ‘is knowing what your limitations are’” (p198).

“’It is not possible to make a mistake,’ she assured me. / I did not know this was a customary greeting given by all Bokononists when meeting a shy person” (p203-204).

“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out …. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed” (p231).

“’Sometimes the POOL-PAH,’ Bokonon tells us, ‘exceeds the power of humans to comment.’ Bokonon translates pool-pah at one point in The Books of Bokonon as ‘shit storm’ and at another point as ‘wrath of God’” (p244).

“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns” (p254).

“’What do they mean, anyway?’ echoed Ambassador Horlick Minton. They mean, ‘For one’s country.’ And he threw away another line. ‘Any country at all,’ he murmured” (p256).

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before” (p281).

“Newt made a shrewd observation. ‘I guess all the excitement in bed had more to do with excitement about keeping the human race going than anybody every imagined” (p283).

“’I know now what my karass has been up to, Newt. It’s been working night and day for maybe half a million years to get me up that mountain.’ I wagged my head and nearly wept. ‘But what, for the love of God, is supposed to be in my hands?’” (p286).

There are very few adaptations of Vonnegut’s stories out there, which is super-surprising to me. At any rate, there’s nothing for Cat’s Cradle. How White Noise got made and not Cat’s Cradle is beyond me.