From the time I discovered Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction around 1970, I simply could not get enough of it to sate my appetite for his wit, irony, satire and the genius with which he called attention to our society’s foibles in a manner that had us laughing at our own serious flaws.
My first taste was Slaughterhouse Five (1969), his famous anti-war novel in which he posed that, since everything exists simultaneously, humanity is insignificant; from that point I was hooked, became a Vonnegut glutton. I binged on his five earlier novels, from Player Piano (1959) through God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) then suffered through Vonnegut famines of roughly three years each while awaiting his subsequent novels. Beginning with Breakfast of Champions (1973), I was too hungry to wait for the feast; rather than place a reserve on the book at the Public Library or wait until it came out in paperback, I ran out and purchased the hardback the day it hit the bookstore shelves.
It was a sad day, indeed, when shortly after the publication of Timequake (1997), Vonnegut announced that he’d written his last novel. Like, I suppose, most other Vonnegut aficionados, I always hoped he wasn’t serious about that pronouncement, that there would be another novel forthcoming. Though he did offer us a few other choice fiction tidbits afterwards – two collections of short stories, Bagombo Snuff Box (1999) and Look at the Birdie (2009, posthumous) — that next novel never came. And never will. Kurt Vonnegut died in April 2007.
So it goes.
RIP Mr. Trout
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