Book of the week: And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields

(Henry Holt, $30)

The Kurt Vonnegut we remember was “a strenuous work of artifice,” said James Camp in The New York Observer. Clean-cut until his late 40s, the Indianapolis native purposefully adopted his trademark shock of curls and brushy mustache just before the release of the 1969 novel that would establish him overnight as a kind of Mark Twain of the counterculture. Slaughterhouse-Five is typical of Vonnegut’s best work, in that it presents a catastrophic event—in this case, the Allied forces’ bombing of Germany’s Dresden—from the perspective of a “bemused bit player” who comments wryly on the horrors of the human condition. But Charles Shields’s insightful new biography reveals that even the shrug of that book’s refrain—“so it goes”—was Vonnegut playacting. The author was a dedicated careerist. He only pretended to be morally above it all.

“And So It Goes isn’t a book to rekindle the popularity of its subject’s work,” said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Vonnegut’s best satirical work was “too time specific to age well,” and Shields knows it. But his “gossipy page-turner of a biography” tells a potent life story that’s in part built on Vonnegut’s contradictions. The novelist was adored by hippies yet didn’t really get them, once showing up to a lyric-writing session with Jefferson Airplane in a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtips. His personal life was all paradox. He cultivated a reputation as a populist but lived a high-society life in New York. He wrote such lines as, “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind!” but was often irascible in private and abandoned his first family after achieving fame.

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Vonnegut fans are at least given ample reason to sympathize with the man, said Michael Merschel in The Dallas Morning News. His mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day when Vonnegut was 21. Shortly thereafter, he was deployed to Europe, where he served as an infantryman at the Battle of the Bulge and was captured by the Nazis. At Dresden, he survived the Allied firebombing by hiding in a meat locker and was later assigned to round up the dead bodies and burn them. “You might consider him a hero simply for enduring so much pain.” But Shields also convinces us that Vonnegut would not have had the appeal he did if not for his personality flaws, particularly his immaturity. He appealed to the young, we learn, because he was not himself “a fully mature adult.”