Vonne Gut Reactions: God Bless You, Mr Rosewater: or Pearls Before Swine

What're we on now, three books? Four?

Five?!?

Yup, five of Vonnegut's novels done in just over three and a half months. I should be just fine to get through all fourteen novels this year at this pace, but I'm going to have to pick things up if I'm going to have them finished by the end of the summer, the adjusted goal.

So, we're reached the 'or' trilogy of Vonnegut's work. Each of his next three novels have a second, official title separated by 'or' from the more well-known title of the work. This one is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine.

Let's look at the basic plot and then at my thoughts on the book. The book opens on a supposedly repugnant little creature of a accountant in the form of Norman Mushari. Mushari is a young accountant in charge of the Rosewater Foundation, the final legal heir of which is the titular Elliot Rosewater. Mushari sees an opportunity to transfer the holdings of the Rosewater Foundation from the 'Indiana' branch of the Rosewater clan to the less affluent, less successful Rhode Island branch of the family, most of whom know absolutely nothing about their more well-off 'Indiana' brethren. It's Mushari's plan, however, to perhaps take a little finder's fee from the fortune in the process of the transfer.

(None of that is really spoilerish as that's all revealed within the first chapter or so. I once saw a bit of writerly advice from Vonnegut telling any burgeoning writers to reveal their story to the reader in the first pages. He pointed out that none of us [readers] has the time to go looking for the plot. Put it right out there for everyone to see.)

If you click through, you'll get spoilers.




From there we wander to Indiana to find Eliot Rosewater happily living among the Hoosiers and giving away his yearly income (interest from the foundation only, foundation entirely managed without Eliot's input by Mushari's firm). Eliot hands out small grants to nearly anyone in the county from which he and his family 'hale' (they haven't resided there in decades.) By the time we meet Eliot, everyone in town knows him, and he's become something of a savior for the entire town, and his wife has left him for less rural climes.

Once the Indiana scene has been firmly established, the tale shifts east to the Rhode Island branch of the family, meandering through extended character sketches and scenes of the Rhode Island Rosewaters. When, finally, Eliot's father finds him in Indiana and lays the law down that Eliot will move back to New York, prompting Eliot's full and total breakdown - nothing dramatic, nothing exciting, just a simple disconnect from reality followed by a quick resolution a year later once Eliot returns to reality.

So, my thoughts on the book...

• Kilgore Trout and Tralfamador are back. Trout is consistently an author of interesting but commercially unsuccessful novels in no matter which of Vonnegut's books he appears. I love that Vonnegut continues to reuse Trout as the favorite author of so many of his characters, especially when Trout is openly known to be Vonnegut's alter ego in his fictional world.
• I also appreciate that so much of Vonnegut's worlds connect in weird, little detail ways. The Rumfoord family, for example reappears here with an entirely different back story. Between these little reassurances and the constant connections to Vonnegut (and my) home state, Indiana, Vonnegut's books feel comfortable to me.
• On page 192 (of my volume, anyway) we hear that Lincoln Ewald was a World War II Nazi sympathizer who radio'ed the Germans to tell them to bomb Rosewater, Indiana where armor plate and paratrooper knives were being made for the US Army. Instead, however, the radio transmission was received in Turkey Run State Park, one of my favorite state parks. I spent many a happy memory-making days and afternoons and midnights in Turkey Run from Wabash. Thank you for a quick memory check, Kurt.

• The word oubliette returned to us. This is only the second use I've ever heard for the word, but it's two straight Vonnegut books in a row for me. "[The other mental processes] rebel at last. They pitch the tyrannous conscience down an oubliette, weld shut the manhole of that dark dungeon. They hear the conscience no more."
• "I look at these people, these Americans," Eliot went on, "and I realize that they can't even care about themselves any more - because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river - they're almost completely automated now. And America doesn't even need these people for war - not any more." Again with the automation of factories making people feel useless. At least here we move quickly past it rather than spending an entire book on it like Player Piano did.
• I found it interesting that we got a pretty standard "only the crazy people really know how crazy our world is" scene from Vonnegut. 
• When Eliot was asked to perform a baptism, he said that he would "Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkle some water on the babies, say, 'Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-:
  
  " 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.' "
  
  That's deservedly one of Vonnegut's best quotes. A couple of years ago our overly-excitable building principal had us make 'posters' for outside our doors at PHS. There are photos and our colleges and degrees. And then there's a quote that somehow meant something to us. My first choice ended up being "What you do speaks to loudly that I cannot hear what you say" which might be from Emerson.
  
  This quote from Vonnegut was my second choice. I love it, but it's not quite as effective without the God damn it, and I wasn't putting that part on my door
• Vonnegut puts forth an analogy about a 'money river'...The conversation takes place between Eliot Rosewater and his father, the Senator. This conversation begins with the Senator.
• "Perhaps, if they stopped believing in crazy things like the Money River, and got to work, they would stop having such a rotten time."
• "If there isn't a Money River, then how did I make ten thousand dollars today, just by snoozing and scratching myself, and occasionally answering the phone?"
• "It's still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own."
• "Sure - provided somebody tells him when he's young enough that there is a Money River, that there's nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. 'Go where the rich and the powerful are,' I'd tell him, 'and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You'll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket of all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.' "
• The Money River very much sounds like what Mushari had planned for himself.
• It's interesting that the plot of the book never really goes anywhere. We get this big build up of Mushari's grand plan, but the rest of the book is mostly just us meeting and getting to know various characters. What I supposed was the plot - Mushari trying to steal the money - never really panned out and was only dealt with in passing. Instead, this is a book about privilege and what the privileged do to make themselves feel good.
• One of the wealthy homes in Rhode Island is opened to the local commoners one day a year, but the owner clearly is unhappy with the arrangement, doing so only because it's written into his will that the house's first owner (his ancestor) wanted to show the common folks what they could aspire to if they worked hard.
• Eliot asks his father why he should buy fabulous paintings at ridiculous prices only to loan them out to the museums so poor people could see the paintings.
• This theme comes up a number of other times throughout the book. One of the rich, even, refers to this as putting out the titular pearls before swine.
• This seems to be the major theme of the book: rich people keep their money but throw out little crumbs to the poor so they can feel good and not get the poor too angry.

Themes that I'm getting from Vonnegut...

• War is fought by children.
• The British ambassador in Cat's Cradle speaks eloquently on this subject.
• In Mother Night we get the main character speaking of his power to convince even children and young people to move toward war.
• Sirens of Titan sees the final shot fired from Mars toward Earth filled with women and children.
• Slaughterhouse Five (yet to come) certainly deals with this theme.
• Our fates are determined - or perhaps we simply aren't masters of our own fates.
• Sirens of Titan especially, but also Mother Night as the main character is subject to the whims of those around him, simply drifting as a leaf on the breeze. 
• Certainly in Cat's Cradle as the narrator wanders the planet semi-aimlessly but driven by forces greater than himself, a very Bokonian thing to accept.
• Somewhat in Player Piano because people's eventual social and societal places are determined from birth by their intelligence.
• Our fates are also random.
• In Cat's Cradle the oddest accident - the crashing of the plane into the palace - causes the end of the world.
• "And so it goes" (coming up in Slaughterhouse Five) says to me that no matter what you want to happen, no matter how you feel, the events of the world continue without you. You are small relative to the world, so don't bother trying to fight it.
• I wonder how much of this comes from Vonnegut's experiences in World War II when no matter how heroic or awful a soldier was, he could still end up dead from gunfire. Survivor's guilt/helplessness?
• People need purpose and industry takes away that purpose.
• Player Piano was entirely about this.
• In Rosewater Eliot explains that the people of Rosewater, IN have lost their purpose because of the automation of the plant. 

From NNDB...

Common themes in Vonnegut's work include the dehumanization wrought by technology, as well as by bureaucracy and media indoctrination. Sexuality and violence and the myths that spring up around them are also common themes. While Vonnegut's work has sometimes been criticized for flouting accepted narrative conventions, for "sophomoric simplicity", and for vulgarity, there is no mistaking the passion of his underlying arguments -- for pacifism, for socialist equality, and most of all for the need for common decency. Yet what separates Vonnegut from other social commentators and political do-gooders is that he never seemed compelled to elevate himself above the rest of humanity. He portrayed himself, as he did nearly everyone else (hero or villain), as a dumb schmuck struggling to do his best, despite mispatched mental programming and an unsteady world.

I particularly appreciate that last part, 'portrayed...nearly everyone...as a dumb schmuck struggling to do hit [or her] best, despite mispatched mental programming and an unsteady world.'

Maybe that's what I love about Kurt Vonnegut's writing.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with thoughts about Slaughterhouse Five - which I claim is my favorite book ever.