Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade

1969, undated Delta edition (4th printing)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Original price unknown, purchase price $1.95
Very worn paperback with broken spine
C+

This book isn't as frustrating as Catch-22, but then it's also not as clever or as deep.  It doesn't particularly work as an anti-war novel, since the message is that everything is going to happen anyway, and it doesn't particularly work as a sci-fi novel, although I do like the idea of the seven sexes of the planet Tralfamadore.  It doesn't even work as a character study since Billy has no personality except passivity.  (Maybe we should introduce him to Martha Quest.)  He becomes unstuck in time, but it doesn't really matter since he's not in one time long enough to do much of anything, even if he were a more active character.

I found some of Vonnegut's writing tics to be annoying, not just all the "so it goes'es" (which Linda Ellerbee uses to greater effect in And So It Goes, coming up in 1987) but also his use of Billy Pilgrim's full name.  So why not a lower grade?  Well, it wasn't boring and the time-hopping kept things moving along, even if they weren't really going much of anywhere.  The book seemed a lot more profound, and funnier, to me when I first read it in my teens, but then so did Catch-22.

The 1960s come to an end, with more posts than for the entire 1800s, although we seem to be returning to Victorianly unwieldy titles.  And so it goes.