Content area
Full Text
BOON, KEVIN ALEXANDER, Ed.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 204 pp. $17.95.
Kurt Vonnegut's work has for too long been relegated to the second tier of American letters; critics have given him credit for being a clever satirist whose fame in the 1960s and 1970s was fueled by those troubled days, a time which many now relegate to a naive and even harmful period in American history. Vonnegut's early label as a science-fiction writer and his humor, often sophomoric and repetitive, have helped critics dismiss his antic, odd-ball characters and non-linear stories with obtrusive narrators (more often than not himself) as silly and simplistic tales. But as Nick Lowe admonished his listeners in his early '80's song "What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding," flippancy toward the need for compassion and love in the modern, chaotic world is just cheap cynicism. Vonnegut refuses to give in to the forces of nihilism and misanthrophy that social critics from Twain to Faulkner to Joseph Heller, those who have looked Western civilization squarely in its blood-thirsty eyes, have long held as close demons.
At Millennium's End offers mostly intelligent and well-reasoned arguments for placing Vonnegut's oeuvre at the forefront of writing in the second-half of the twentieth-century. Vonnegut has created a universe, not unlike Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County in comprehensiveness and craft, in which the author can offer his own yearnings for what humankind must do to survive in an era capable of, and willing to, exercise mass murder. Vonnegut has produced a body of work that has consistently shown, even in its darkest tone, compassion for the plight of the human being. In an age of increasing celebration of meaninglessness, he has striven to offer purpose to life....