*

Two decades later, I can see the thesis as something even more excruciatingly personal: an artistic prospectus. I was explaining to myself, often explicitly, the sort of writer I wished to become.

The main thing was that Vonnegut made an impact on readers. He wasn’t one of those recluses who hid behind coy fictional guises. Every sentence he wrote, every character, was stamped in his image. He came clean on the page as a guy losing his shit. Like in that famous first chapter in Slaughterhouse-Five, the image of Vonnegut lying in bed, sleepless, drunk-dialing his old war buddies and stinking of mustard gas and roses.

He was honest about why he wrote, too. He copped to that central (if rarely mentioned) impulse of the writing life: he wanted attention. He spoke bluntly, courageously, about prevailing injustices, not just on the page, but in public. He was funny, self-deprecating, easy to read, a (gasp) populist. He wanted to speak to everyone and he wanted everyone to shape the hell up. He hated rich people and warmongers and fanatics. He didn’t pretend not to care.

*

And that’s not all.

Vonnegut was an atheist.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut was a Scorpio.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut was a youngest child.

(So was I!)

Vonnegut viewed film and television as enemies of human progress.

(So did I!)

He hated literary critics.

(So did I!)

Vonnegut even seemed to intuit the emotional crises in my life: that I felt exiled by my family, simultaneously disgusted and humiliated by the world of men, desperate for human comfort. He spoke of loneliness constantly. He characterized writers as people “who feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.”

He was, to summarize, not just my role model, but my shrink.

*

I am not suggesting that I recognized my own motives in writing about Vonnegut. Of course I didn’t – I was a college student.

But it was more than that. I wasn’t a writer. I had no concept (aside from Vonnegut) of what a writer might be. I didn’t take a single creative writing class at Wesleyan. Instead, I became what one of my classmates called, not unkindly, a “campus cartoon character.” I undertook a variety of extracurricular activities. I edited the newspaper (so did Vonnegut!). I was a sports broadcaster for the college radio station.[14] I was a resident advisor. I sang in a gospel choir. I raced around our lovely campus asking, with my every gesture and deed, the same question: what will the story of my life be?

*

I don’t especially like thinking about my college years. They were a bleak era for me, and a bleak era for the country. Ronald Reagan had just won his second term in a landslide and the staggering cruelties advocated by what has come to be known as the conservative movement were very much in vogue. Greed was good, facts were stupid things, Jesus was in, personal sacrifice was out, the nation was beginning a long, slow decline into moral disassociation.

The details were straight out of a B-movie. Astrologers were setting the agenda upstairs at the White House, while a gang of nutty neocons trashed the basement, running guns to Iran and funneling the cash to the death squads (the term “terrorists” was not yet in vogue) who opposed a legally elected government in Nicaragua.

I had no idea what to do about any of this. I felt guilty and pissed off all the time. I listened to “I Will Dare” by the Replacements 12,000 times. I took a class called Nuclear War. My final project was a newspaper report that detailed the destruction of my hometown by a hydrogen bomb.

*

Boom.

*

The Vonnegut passage that haunted me throughout my college years is one of the few not quoted in my thesis. It comes from a curious little essay called “Biafra: A People Betrayed,” in his 1974 collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons. Vonnegut is reporting from the small African nation of Biafra, whose beleaguered citizens are bracing for a genocidal invasion by the Nigerian army.

He writes,

What did we eat in Biafra? As guests of the government, we had meat and yams and soups and fruit. It was embarrassing. Whenever we told a cadaverous beggar, “No chop,” it wasn’t really true. We had plenty of chop, but it was all in our bellies.

I had never read so ruthless and candid a summary of the relationship between the fed and starving of this world. Vonnegut was writing not only about injustice, but the peculiar American talent for self-deception (his own included), for espousing laudable beliefs just so long as you don’t have to live up to them.

*

To understand why this passage hit me so hard will require some family background. My mother was born and raised in the Bronx. Her mother, Annie Rosenthal, was an elementary school teacher in Harlem. Her father, Irving, was an actuary. Both were members of the Communist party. My grandmother was eventually asked to testify about her activities before the New York Board of Education. She took an early retirement instead. Secrecy and fear pervaded their apartment.

My own parents came of age during the 1960s. Both were early, vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam. My father helped undergraduates organize anti-war protests at Stanford, where he had taken a job on the faculty of the medical school. He was later arrested himself for taking part in a protest at a nearby Air Force base. His teaching contract was not renewed. What I am trying to convey here is that I am descended from people who suffered for their beliefs. I arrived at college eager to do the same thing.

*

But Wesleyan wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It was, to be ruthless and candid, the world capital of Entitled Sanctimony, the kind of place where students staged protests to demand divestment from South Africa, then headed over to the dining hall to stuff themselves full of ice cream, where the lower-class toughs who played hockey and joined frats were considered dangerous misogynists, where kids in carefully torn polo sweaters gathered to chant grave, humanist slogans then dispersed to drop acid on Foss Hill, where noblesse oblige had mutated into a kind of desperate narcissistic accessory.

I did my best to fit in, to obey, for instance, the elaborate protocols surrounding gender and race nomenclature.[15] But it was impossible to ignore certain facts, such as that most black students wanted nothing to do with white students, and that the residents of Middletown regarded the lot of us as spoiled brats. I spent a few winter afternoons camped on the corners of Main Street, handing out pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, which they accepted politely, then deposited in the nearest trashcan.

It was also impossible to ignore the affluence of my classmates. They had new cars and elaborate stereo systems and Park Avenue apartments stuffed with high art. They spent vacations at beach houses and in tennis clubs, and their ease in these exotic precincts struck me hard; these were people born on the banks of what Vonnegut called the Money River.

I don’t mean to make my classmates sound like dolts. They were trying to care about the world, however indulgently. My scorn for them was an expression of my own guilt. I couldn’t shake the benighted notion that the best way to honor the family legacy was to suffer for my beliefs.

*

So I washed dishes in the cafeteria. I volunteered at a mental health facility. I endured the routine miseries of the unpaid internship. And I read Vonnegut voraciously, through the long, muggy summer evenings, dripping sweat onto the pages of my yellowed paperbacks.

He was the one guy who cut through the bullshit. He understood that our essential crisis was not one of policy, but morality, individual greed, inconsideration, suicidal self-regard. He was mad as hell, but – unlike my classmates – he found the absurd comedy within his fury. He didn’t write quiet little novels about bourgeois plight. He wrote about what we college students called, always with that frisson of knowing dread, the real world. In Vonnegut, I found a path back to the political ideals of my family.

But my Vonnegut mania was about more than politics. His books filled me with a terrible personal longing. I had grown up in a family beset by sorrow and had come to believe, unconsciously, that the world was a broader reflection of this sorrow, that it was my job to save the place, that only by banishing pain would my own joy become permissible. Vonnegut operated on the same absurd, sentimental assumptions. He regarded civilization as a failed family, curable only by the reestablishment of clans in which members felt dutybound to love one another. Happy families. He wrote about them over and over. They became his utopia, then mine as well.

*

Now comes a difficult confession.

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