Curious: A Vonnegut consideration

"Boom! Zoom! . . . It's the big smashup! . . . The whole street caving in at the waterfront! . . . It's Orleans crumbling and thunder in the Grand Cafe! . . . A table sails by and splits the air! . . . Marble bird! . . . spins round, shatters a window to splinters! . . . A houseful of furniture rocks, spins from the casements, scatters in a rain of fire! . . . The proud bridge, twelve arches, staggers, topples smack into the mud. The slime of the river splatters! . . . mashes, splashes the mob yelling choking overflowing at the parapet! . . . It's pretty bad . . ."

(The influence on Kerouac is pretty obvious.)

And then there's the overall tone and attitude of Celine and Vonnegut that are so different. This is Celine in Journey: "The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows."

"Stupid" may well be Celine's favorite adjective for anything involving humans. This, in comparison, is Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:

The novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled ... because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

"And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?' "

To a degree, both Vonnegut and Celine are satirists, morally outraged by the horrors and meaninglessness and sham they've witnessed. But Celine's bilious sarcasm (with murmurs of human sympathy) is so distinct from Vonnegut's whimsical despair, his sadsack humor. Celine rages and sneers and whimpers; Vonnegut empathizes, takes a few shots, slips into a cosmic view -- and shrugs.

I'm not saying one is necessarily more profound than the other, but these differences help explain what Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote in a wise New York Times opinion-page appreciation Friday: One best encounters Vonnegut as an adolescent ("No one nourishes the skepticism of the young like Vonnegut"). I would even argue that the 13-year-old who becomes a fan of Celine is a kid looking for an easy provocation; he hopes to offend or bewilder adults who see him reading Death on the Installment Plan.

But once you've matured -- and, I would add, once you've encountered Samuel Beckett or Celine or DeLillo or Calvino or Didion or Cormac McCarthy or other authors with a steelier response to life -- "Vonnegut," Mr. Klinkenborg writes, "is not, now, somehow serious enough."

Exactly. OK, so perhaps I am saying one author is more profound than the other. Even so, Mr. Klinkenborg encourages the reader to "revisit that earlier self." And I'd agree. It's not that I don't have a great deal of affection for Slaughterhouse-Five -- and George Roy Hill's film adaptation is one of the smartest cinematic treatments of a contemporary American novel, well worth re-visiting.

But I think Vonnegut weakened his case as a major writer by continuing to write in the same but decidedly thinner manner. Part of Slaughterhouse-Five's power came -- for me, at least -- from what seemed its freshness, its unwillingness to fall into the usual postures or attitudes (yes, it was anti-war but it wasn't an easy polemic, a howl of righteous outrage). Yet when Vonnegut continued to produce pretty much the same attitude, the same tone and approach, directed toward more trivial or merely timely topics, it weakened Slaughterhouse-Five in retrospect. "So it goes" now seemed an irritating avoidance of something deeper or more engaged, an understandably wounded response, but a response born from the fear that anything stronger or more thought-through would just be futile in its own way, trigger more violence, more pointlessness. So why make the effort?

Vonnegut's response suits a teen's early encounter with something as overwhelming or confounding as nuclear war or the Holocaust or cosmic meaninglessness. It's deeper than ordinary flippancy but it's more amusing than the usual adolescent anguish over hypocrisy. The stance seems more knowing, more wearily experienced, than it really is.

Still, if Beckett and Celine and DeLillo can make me laugh, make me cackle, it's Vonnegut who made me smile.