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firecat posted about
Mother Night, which she liked. I don't, and I said why:
"We are what we pretend to be" is precisely the moral that made me say, "Who are you and what have you done with the guy who wrote Cat's Cradle and The Sirens of Titan?"
Of course we are not what we pretend to be, good or bad. Vonnegut fundamentally distrusted all fiction and pretense. Like a fundamentalist with a large penis, he had a gift for something he found despicable. Deadeye Dick was incredibly boring because he felt it would have been wrong to make it interesting, and the final expression of that self-hatred was Galapagos, in which he imagined how much happier we would be without those big human brains. I am not surprised that he attempted suicide after he finished it.
And yet, when he was not expressing that one craziness, he was a genius: the two books I mentioned, Breakfast of Champions (in which he briefly overcame his guilt about making things up), and marvelous stories like "The Barnhouse Effect."
