Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. [...] We were a disease, she said, which had evolved on one tiny cinder in the universe, but could spread and spread."

I am ambivalent about Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird (1979). On the one hand the author pushes many of my hot buttons and I agree with his choices of human failings to lampoon - human race as a disease affecting the universe is a brilliant metaphor - but on the other, the diagnoses and solutions he offers are way too simplistic and naive. There are some brilliant passages in the novel but many others are ridiculous, childish, or just plain silly.

Jailbird can be divided into two, quite disjoint parts. The first is a memoir of one Walter F. Starbuck, the son of a Polish chauffeur and a Lithuanian cook working for an American millionaire. Thanks to his parents' employer's sponsorship Mr. Starbuck graduates from Harvard, but then - during the grim days of the Depression - he becomes a Communist. Much later he is interrogated by Richard Nixon himself during congressional committee hearings. The future president remembers him and Starbuck obtains a job in Nixon's White House, as a Special Advisor on Youth. He becomes one of the scapegoats in the Watergate affair and goes to prison.

I find the first part realistic, almost "historical", and captivating. Vonnegut focuses on the issues of labor movement in the US. He writes:

"Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor's sufferings and derring-do."

One of the most dramatic fragments of the novel is the depiction of the fictitious Cuyahoga Massacre where the soldiers killed fourteen protesting workers of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron, wounded scores of others, and - the worst of all (sarcasm!) - caused serious stutter in Mr. Starbuck's future employer. Another dramatic fragment depicts the factual story of executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, anarchists convicted of murder, but guilty only of "dangerous radical activities."

The novel's second, present-time part that begins on the day of Starbuck's release from prison is a sort of fantasy tale:

"This is just the dream of a jailbird. It's not supposed to make sense."

Here we encounter The RAMJAC Corporation that owns 19% of the entire wealth of the United States and the story focuses on Mr. Starbuck's connections with the mysterious Mrs. Graham who is the majority stockholder. I am not enthusiastic about that part of the novel, not only because I dislike fantasy in literature, but mainly because it dissolves the stronger message of the novel's "historical" part. Although I burst out laughing over the hilarious commentary on the average American level of literacy: Vonnegut writes about an invention needed in the times when "it was getting harder all the time to find employees who understood numbers well": images of products are put on the keys of a cash register rather than numbers.

Vonnegut's trademark sarcastic view of humanity is made clear by the numerous references to the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of teachings attributed to Jesus Christ in which he predicts that the poor in spirit would receive the Kingdom of Heaven, the meek will inherit the Earth, that the merciful will be treated mercifully, and so on. I wonder why the author does not quote the most striking phrase from the Sermon: "You cannot serve God and wealth" because "no one can serve two masters." Would the author be not bold enough to say that capitalism and Christianity cannot coexist?

Infuriatingly uneven work by the author of the great
Slaughterhouse-Five . Here Vonnegut editorializes way too much and does not let the power of his fiction speak for itself. The beautiful passages about Starbuck's wife and his girlfriend virtually disappear buried deep in well-meant yet inept propaganda.

Two and a half stars.

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