I've had this sitting on a bookshelf with a bookmark sticking out of it at around halfway through for over 10 years so I figured I should finally pull it out and finish the damn thing... but I just couldn't make it all the way.

I love Vonnegut but this just wasn't very good. The jokes aren't funny, the characters are dull and it's disjointed to the point that I constantly lost track of where I was. I'm assuming his hatred of Nixon and that particular era of Capitalism managed to turn his usual sarcasm into anger. I did agree with the sentiments expressed though, and that's the only reason it gets a 2nd star.

Got so lost in the sauce just for him to end up in jail again

The author does not want you to know this but Goodreads has just been purchased by the RAMJAC Corporation.

I had heard so much about this author's sarcasm, about his humour, about his unique style, before deciding to read one of his books. I started with Slaughterhouse - Five, which was not a good pick for me. To make up for it, I bought "Jailbird ".. and I fell in love.
His style is special, he has a way of making the extraordinary seem mondane and the obvious, unseen.. I do think he's one of the best writers I know!

I had never read Jailbird (1979) by Kurt Vonnegut, which I understood to loosely be about Nixon and his henchmen's Watergate criminal activities, and subsequent jailing of all the "finest men" with whom he was surrounded. I bought it at a used bookstore in 2020, hopeful to be able to reflect on the jailing of associates of the then Leader of the Free World. But I finally picked it up as I see the still increased "legal complications" of the previous administration.

Jailbird, I discovered, was less focused on Watergate than the American twentieth-century. I liked one blurb a lot" "A masterful satire. . . at once funny and corrosive; beyond the laughter. . . lies passionate anger. . . at the principal inhumanities of contemporary life in the United States. The anger. . . is kept under exquisite control."

The fictional Walter Starbuck was one of several Watergate break-in men incarcerated. Many of the men Walter meets in prison were "Harvard men," as he himself was. He was born into wealth, as many of these political operatives were, and, well, you already know how hard it is to get into Heaven if you are driven primarily by Greed.

“Most of those businesses, rigged only to make profits, were as indifferent to the needs of the people as, say, thunderstorms[. . . .] The businesses of RAMJAC, by their very nature, were as unaffected by the joys and tragedies of human beings as the rain that fell on the night that Madeiros and Sacco and Vanzetti died in an electric chair. It would have rained anyway. The economy is a thoughtless weather system—and nothing more.”

RAMJAC is a fictional company, a super-conglomerated monopoly pac-manning little companies all over the country, and of course Walter, post-prison, gets appointed as Vice-President. The economy is one part of the apocalyptic vision Vonnegut shares with us. And this is one of his best books after Slaughterhouse Five, another dark and hilarious comedy about man's propensity for self-destruction and cruel treatment of the working class.

One thing Vonnegut is angry about is Sacco & Vanzetti, two immigrants wrongly executed in the thirties, The Depression, when this novel takes place. But we begin with a historical incident, the Cuyahoga Bridge (anti-union, Christmas morning) Massacre (of unarmed families begging for jobs back, or, failing that, food), which shapes Walter's legacy in many ways, and leads him to become the man he is, such as he is.

What else is he upset about? War, disarmament, economic equality, political corruption (Spiro Agnew, one of our finest criminal vice-presidents!). And on and on, and so it goes. Hey, he's a lib, he's woke, imagine that!

Lots of jokes are scattered about the book, things to make you laugh instead of cry. Vonnegut's a humorist and a humanist, not a nihilist.

What can we hope for, post-1979?

“I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.”

Vonnegut is Lenny Bruce and Howard Zinn and Mark Twain and FDR all wrapped into one, and tied with a bow for your reading pleasure. On of his very best.

I have officially given up on choosing a favorite Vonnegut. They're all amazing, which is why I'm reading every last one.
Though I was a bit thrown off with this one, firstly because I thought Kilgore Trout was real, not just a pseudonym of Dr Bob Fender. Secondly, the fact that most of the facts referenced in this book are true. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, and Watergate.

Here's my favorite part of this one:
And then I regaled myself with a story by my prison friend Dr. Robert Fender, which he had published under the name of “Kilgore Trout.” It was called “Asleep at the Switch.” It was about a huge reception center outside the Pearly Gates of heaven—filled with computers and staffed by people who had been certified public accountants or investment counselors or business managers back on Earth.

You could not get into heaven until you had submitted to a full review of how well you had handled the business opportunities God, through His angels, had offered to you on Earth.

All day long and in every cubicle you could hear the experts saying with utmost weariness to people who had missed this opportunity and then that one: “And there you were, asleep at the switch again.”

How much time had I spent in solitary by then? I will make a guess: five minutes.

“Asleep at the Switch” was quite a sacrilegious story. The hero was the ghost of Albert Einstein. He himself was so little interested in wealth that he scarcely heard what his auditor had to say to him. It was some sort of balderdash about how he could have become a billionaire, if only he had gotten a second mortgage on his house in Bern, Switzerland, in Nineteen-hundred and Five, and invested the money in known uranium deposits before telling the world that E=Mc².

“But there you were—asleep at the switch again,” said the auditor.

“Yes,” said Einstein politely, “it does seem rather typical.”

“So you see,” said the auditor, “life really was quite fair. You did have a remarkable number of opportunities, whether you took them or not.”

“Yes, I see that now,” said Einstein.

“Would you mind saying that in so many words?” said the auditor.“That life was fair.”

“Life was fair,” said Einstein.

“If you don’t really mean it,” said the auditor, “I have many more examples to show you. For instance, just forgetting atomic energy: If you had simply taken the money you put into a savings bank when you were at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and you had put it, starting in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty, say, into IBM and Polaroid and Xerox—even though you had only five more years to live—” The auditor raised his eyes suggestively, inviting Einstein to show how smart he could be.

“I would have been rich?” said Einstein.

“‘Comfortable,’ shall we say?” said the auditor smugly. “But there you were again—” And again his eyebrows went up.“Asleep at the switch?” asked Einstein hopefully.

The auditor stood and extended his hand, which Einstein accepted unenthusiastically. “So you see, Doctor Einstein,” he said, “we can’t blame God for everything, now can we?” He handed Einstein his pass through the Pearly Gates. “Good to have you aboard,” he said.

So into heaven Einstein went, carrying his beloved fiddle. He thought no more about the audit. He was a veteran of countless border crossings by then. There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.

But once inside heaven Einstein encountered ghost after ghost who was sick about what his or her audit had shown. One husband and wife team, which had committed suicide after losing everything in a chicken farm in New Hampshire, had been told that they had been living the whole time over the largest deposit of nickel in the world.

A fourteen-year-old Harlem child who had been killed in a gang fight was told about a two-carat diamond ring that lay for weeks at the bottom of a catch basin he passed every day. It was flawless and had not been reported as stolen. If he had sold it for only a tenth of its value, four hundred dollars, say, according to his auditor, and speculated in commodities futures, especially in cocoa at that time, he could have moved his mother and sisters and himself into a Park Avenue condominium and sent himself to Andover and then to Harvard after that.

There was Harvard again.

All the auditing stories that Einstein heard were told by Americans. He had chosen to settle in the American part of heaven. Understandably, he had mixed feelings about Europeans, since he was a Jew. But it wasn’t only Americans who were being audited. Pakistanis and pygmies from the Philippines and even communists had to go through the very same thing.

It was in character for Einstein to be offended first by the mathematics of the system the auditors wanted everybody to be so grateful for. He calculated that if every person on Earth took full advantage of every opportunity, became a millionaire and then a billionaire and so on, the paper wealth on that one little planet would exceed the worth of all the minerals in the universe in a matter of three months or so. Also: There would be nobody left to do any useful work.

So he sent God a note. It assumed that God had no idea what sorts of rubbish His auditors were talking. It accused the auditors rather than God of cruelly deceiving new arrivals about the opportunities they had had on Earth. He tried to guess the auditors’ motives. He wondered if they might not be sadists.

The story ended abruptly. Einstein did not get to see God. But God sent out an archangel who was boiling mad. He told Einstein that if he continued to destroy ghosts’ respect for the audits, he was going to take Einstein’s fiddle away from him for all eternity. So Einstein never discussed the audits with anybody ever again. His fiddle meant more to him than anything.

Sorry about that. But if that doesn't make you want to read Vonnegut, nothing will.

My least favorite Vonnegut book, though I think I may have glimpsed in this the depression which led him to attempt suicide in the early '80's. This was a hard slog.

Najbardziej antykapilistyczna, antyludzka i chyba najpoważniejszą, a jednocześnie najokrutniejsza (i naprawdę rozbijająca dobre samopoczucie niespodziewanymi wkrętami) powieść Vonneguta jaką przeczytałem.

Jailbird is all over the place in that great Vonnegut way. It's about an elderly man who is released from minimum security prison, where he was serving a sentence for white collar crimes he committed while inadvertently involving himself in the Watergate scandal.

The book is a great collection of character interactions, as the protagonist reconnects with several people from his past life, as well as people in the new, dispassionate world in which he finds himself.

Through the actions and thoughts of the characters, heavy criticism is made of American corporatism. Parts of the book are dedicated to recounting some of the history of the American labor industry. However, sharp criticisms are also made against communism and idealism.

And, as usual, Vonnegut's writing style is one of the most entertaining and fulfilling things about this book.

"Strong stuff."

In the lesser known work Jailbird , Vonnegut plays with absurdism of a kind markedly different from his own characteristic style: one that refers to both the fecundity and futility of the social, political and ideological realities of our world. This book is ostensibly about Walter F. Starbuck; who went to Harvard and later to prison for tangential involvement as a (largely forgotten) public servant in the Watergate scandal; and his first 24 hours as a free man. It is expectantly one of deep political resounding; and, in the author's notoriously 'courteous' style, is about capitalism, corporatism, communism, idealism, cold war, nepotism, and the
Shopping Bag ladies of New York.

The RAMJAC corporation; the importance of which builds on gradually through the book like a Beethovenian symphony; is owned by one of these selfsame Shopping Bag Ladies. Therein lies one of the most brilliant elements of Jailbird : its interweaving of its own emphasis on futile capitalism, on labour movements, on the revolution, on the Only Four Women Walter Has Ever Loved, and the deliverance of the American people — all in a single, colourful character (and her Basketball Shoes). Characterisation in this book is perhaps one of its most fulfilling and unimitable offerings — while the entire book can be seen as a judgement of Walter F. Starbuck as a Harvard Man (only to reveal that all Harvard men are what he is), but it also offers gems such as the blubbering Alexander McCone; alongside the background to the Cuyahoga Massacre, which can be seen as a character in its own right, given how it influenced things; and Frank Ubriaco, who french-fried his own hand.

However, what truly renders this book as one of Vonnegut's best literary masterpieces is the strange metafiction of Kilgore Trout — the famous, influential sci-fi author — and the fact that his true identity is revealed here, and how!
Kilgore Trout (inclusive of other psuedonyms) is in fact Dr. Robert Fender; a veterinarian who works as a meat clerk in the army, and is later arrested for treason for falling in love with and harbouring a North Korean Spy. Fender, in turn, provides us with perhaps the most amusing section of the book — a story about Einstein trying to enter heaven. In this, and in the occasional resurgence of Vonnegutian catchphrases, Jailbird proves that the author should be known for more than just his literary dealings with courtesy and absurdity.

Jailbird seems also to be a particularly nuanced commentary on relationships, and on how these weigh into our worldview. Walter often sees the world through his late wife Ruth's eyes, but his joking on the phone with his former-girlfriend Sarah Clewes also alerts us to deeper psychological significance of the everyday. A particularly endearing literary event in this book is Walter F. Starbuck's reunion with the man he betrayed.

In fact, what makes this book so astounding is the frequency with which notable scenes occur in it.

Starbuck's life is cyclical, and perhaps this is a message: he goes from playing chess with McCone to that with Boris the computer, goes from being sponsored by the tycoon to bring led up the ladder of "success" by Mrs Graham, too: but essentially, he's still playing chess. His son; who is described in many places as "unpleasant"; ends up just like his own father at the end of the book — one is not to say worse. This is essentially what happens to the revolution run with Mary Kathleen's basketball shoes. The book ends a certain way, because there aren't any definite ways things can go in a world where everything can be done by the humanist, but nothing is done in the service of mankind. One can read a lot into the fact that the narrator himself states in the book,

"We all are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure."

Differentially, this book may be seen as one about Harvard men, about politics and humanism and human relationships and forgiveness; but it is essentially the story of America as it is today — a (black) comedy of errors.

Strong stuff.

A serious book from my favourite satirist.

Vonnegut has written about serious issues before but never in a serious manner. This is the only non-Sci-Fi not really humorous book so far. It's still sorta humorous in some moments but for the most part you can't really talk about labor rights and the brutality of the suppression movements (if you care about them) without a serious tone.

Still very enjoyable though. I don't think it ranks among my favorites but it's nice to see a switch up.

New York City, Nineteen-hundred and Seventy-seven. Jimmy Carter is President and his third cousin, Clyde Carter, works as a guard at the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility on the edge of Finletter Air Force Base near Atlanta Georgia where Walter F. Starbuck is about to be released. In Nineteen-Hundred and Seventy Walter F. Starbuck was given a job in Nixon's White House, and was jailed following the political scandal known as Watergate. But this is a story about so much more than that. There's the American labor movement, the Great Depression, WWII, the Radium Girls, the Red Scare, and good old American capitalism (this review, by the way, is proudly sponsored by The RAMJAC Corporation) to name a few, besides Richard Milhous Nixon and Watergate.

Vonnegut, somewhat more subdued than usual, could honestly have wrapped it up a few pages sooner, but the rather eclectic spaces he manages to dream up within New York City--ie the crown of the Chrysler Building, inhabited by a myriad of prothonotary warblers--will stay with me. Peace.