“Some of the best and most moving Vonnegut.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Slapstick presents an apocalyptic vision as seen through the eyes of the current King of Manhattan (and last President of the United States), a wickedly irreverent look at the all-too-possible results of today’s follies. But even the end of life-as-we-know-it is transformed by Kurt Vonnegut’s pen into hilarious farce—a final slapstick that may be the Almighty’s joke on us all.
“Both funny and sad . . . just about perfect.”—Los Angeles Times
“Imaginative and hilarious . . . a brilliant vision of our wrecked, wacked-out future.”—Hartford Courant
This is definitely up there in my personal Vonnegut ranking. My top tier is still Slaughterhouse-Five, Mother Night, and Bluebeard, but Slapstick is easily in the top half of the nine I've read. I always enjoy Vonnegut's absurdism, and I think Slapstick is even better than the more widely-acclaimed Breakfast of Champions. It contains so much humanity even within its ridiculousness. Wilbur's sense of isolation - due to his physical appearance, his intellectual capabilities, his literal exile, the death of his sister, the apocalypse - was very touching even while the book itself was absurd. There's a sentimentality in this book that you wouldn't expect of such an obvious satire, although perhaps the prologue - which is about Vonnegut's sister's death - colours my perception of things a bit. Vonnegut's writing is never overblown or particularly stylized, but it contains so many wonderful little moments that I just marvel over. I absolutely loved the hint at the beginning of the novel that the narrator had died before completing his manuscript, and the posthumous epilogue was perfect.
At this point it's pretty obvious that I'm a big Vonnegut fan. Not sure that this is his most accessible work for those who aren't very familiar with his work, but I really, really enjoyed it.
