Lewis Black on the Life-Changing Power of Kurt Vonnegut

I was lucky. I read Cat’s Cradle and then The Sirens of Titan and then Slaughterhouse-Five and then and then and then all of the work of Kurt Vonnegut. He was one of those writers that you got upset when you realized you were nearly finished reading the book. I began reading him when I was sixteen and working a job collecting fees at a parking lot in Silver Spring, Maryland. Somehow, and I don’t remember but around the same time a copy of Cat’s Cradle dropped magically into my hands.

I say it was magic because I don’t know how else a life-changing book just ended up in my hands. It did change my life. I was reading a book and felt the author was telling me, and just me, a story. As if he were talking to me and wanted me to understand that I wasn’t the only one who thought the world was crazy. Here was an adult telling me he knew it was too. Not one of my friends, but an adult.

Finally, someone who had lived a life saw the world as I did. I’d been having trouble with the world ever since I was told that in case of a nuclear attack, I should get under my desk. I couldn’t understand why. I’d watched what the A-bomb could do. How was a desk going to help, unless it would make me burn faster? All of a sudden, I realized that just because someone was in charge it didn’t mean they knew what they were doing. The crack in reality, like that in a windshield, began to grow. Adults didn’t see the crack at all, but Kurt did and that made all the difference in the world. I knew I wasn’t crazy.

It was made even better by the fact that he was laugh-out-loud funny; because he was telling what I believe was truth while delivering ideas and arguments in the most gentle way imaginable. As if everyone should know these were truths that should be self-evident to any sane human being. Vonnegut’s essay collection, A Man Without a Country, gives us all of this in a very straightforward manner. He unwraps what is the backbone of his fiction, his personal philosophy, and how he learned it from his family and the life he lived. Here, he applies it to the times in which he was living and the politics of that time. It is as if he were writing it for us today and the times we are now muddling through. And I believe it will read that way for any time in the future. For like his fiction, A Man Without a Country is timeless.

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From A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut, available via Seven Stories Press.