Vonnegut

When I was in high school, I favored a small library located in a strip center. The library shelves began as soon as you walked in the door. From my weird spatial perspective, the library arranged the books backwards—the cataloguing began at the front desk, placing the fiction authors whose names were at the end of the alphabet closest to the door. I remember this because I’ll never forget squatting on the floor and finding on the bottom shelf under the “V” Kurt Vonnegut.

I was in the twelfth grade, in an Advance Placement English class. The class gave extra credit for reading. Can you believe that? Extra credit for reading, my favorite thing. Anyway, I found Vonnegut, whose books were small, at least compared to Moby Dick, which we’d read in class. I checked out a couple of them. Slaughterhouse Five and either Cat’s Cradle or Breakfast of Champions, I don’t remember. If a book was not on the Extra Credit list, the teacher had to approve it. Approval had not theretofore been an issue.

Is Vonnegut Okay?

The teacher took my request under advisement. She was older, her gray hair sweeping up dramatically into a bun. When she took the books from me, as always, her hands trembled. Corralling stray wisps of hair from her forehead, she said she’d let me know.

Several days later she stopped me from leaving class. My choice, she said, was not conventional. The language, the scenes—the book contained objectionable material. It was, she sniffed, not her cup of tea. She concluded, however, that I was probably mature enough to decide for myself the value of the book.

The year was 1974. Slaughterhouse Five came out in 1969, Breakfast of Champions in ‘73. Vonnegut had won Hugos and Nebulas, but he was not yet a classic, to say the least. I got the distinct impression the teacher had not yet read him; hence, the delay. But thanks to her begrudgingly open mind, Vonnegut taught me to never separate fantasy from literature.

Reality or Fantasy or Literature

Maybe this mindset was birthed years earlier when my mother read us the Narnia Chronicles at bedtime, me hating to see the white space that signaled a chapter’s end. Later in my senior year, I had my Asimov phase, and one summer I devoured C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. In college it was Lord of the Rings; later, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and every Arthurian legend book ever written. 

None of these classics did I consider “fantasy.” They were just great books, no different from Moby Dick and especially not hallucinogenic William Faulkner. Even when the author is striving for reality, it’s only verisimilitude. The reality contained therein is the author’s created world. 

My literary fantasy When We Were Murderous Time-Traveling Women has dead people returning to today’s New Orleans. The novel cranks up history—my personal history and the city’s. Where does its reality end and fantasy begin? With the treatment I’ve given it, nothing in it is true. And it all is. I think Vonnegut would have approved.