On Vonnegut and the boomers

Like his friend Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut was a hero to babyboomers — though he was raised in an earlier time. The president hemourned was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not John F. Kennedy. His war wasthe Second World War, not Vietnam.  Nearly 40 when the 1960sbegan, Vonnegut was less a peer of the young rebels who loved suchnovels as Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, than a wise, eccentricand cranky uncle, scorning the world’s madness but rarely failing toget some laughs or challenge some minds.  Vonnegut, who died thisweek at 84, didn’t need Vietnam to figure out that the system didn’twork, that the 1950s were a lie and that you shouldn’t believe whatgrown-ups tell you. His absurdist humour, the survival tactic of aformer prisoner of war whose mother had committed suicide, proved asuseful and as up-to-date to the postwar generation as a Bob Dylan song.  “Growingup when I did, at a time of widespread alienation and disgust,Vonnegut’s irreverence was very appealing, and certainly influenced myown views of contemporary life,” said novelist Ken Kalfus, 53, aNational Book Award finalist last year for A Disorder Peculiar to theCountry, a satire of marriage, Sept. 11 and the Iraq war. “His workopened up new space to think about politics and society and also tothink about what literature was good for.” Norman Mailer, anotherSecond World War veteran who found an audience with younger readers,noted that Vonnegut was “an icon to several generations of youngAmericans who rushed to read everything he published.”

Read more in the Victoria (BC) Times-Colonist, http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/index.html