MANY WRITERS INSPIRE ADMIRATION; FAR FEWER INSPIRE LOVE. Kurt Vonnegut, who was born 100 years ago this month, was one of those few.
Read the critical commentary on his output of 14 novels, clutches of essays, oodles of short stories and plays, and there is the expected praise for his style and approach. “A beautifully fastidious writer, utterly original,” said the hard-to-please James Wood. “Vonnegut looked the world straight in the eye and never flinched,” wrote J.G. Ballard, who should know.
But there is something else besides: an element of personal affection for a man they never met. “I feel privileged to have spent several hours in the company of a most genial, affable and upbeat soul indeed,” wrote the novelist Nicholas Royle. One of this year’s Booker Prize shortlisted authors, Shehan Karunatilaka, says that when he was writing his novel, “Uncle Kurt … was a constant companion”.
Why do readers, even hard-nosed professional readers like this one, feel such attachment to both the writing and the man? Part of it may be because with Vonnegut, the soul of the man is so clearly displayed in the writing; and part of it may be because he is a writer that we tend to discover in adolescence, a gateway writer between teenage kicks and grown-up literature, like J.D. Salinger.
