I’m a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut, and the fact that he was so clear-eyed in critiquing America in 1982, when nationalism was on the rise, makes me admire him all the more. Here he remarks on so many things: racism and Nazi sympathies in America, the callousness of the wealthy, the drug industry, and the development of the horrifying neutron bomb for starters (sardonically quipping about the latter, “Since all the property is undamaged, has the world lost anything it loved?”). He also makes points about conspiracy theories, American paranoia, and the gun culture of the NRA (and boy, he had seen nothing yet). As the quotes below attest to, when he makes a point that resonates, it’s like fire on the page.

Unfortunately, the story constructed in Deadeye Dick falters after a strong start, never really developing into the type of cohesive narrative that’s engaging. The recipes interspersed through the narrative seemed random. The device of shifting the narrative to a screenplay was overdone. There are little bits of information tacked on in places that seem purposeless, and could have used editing. At times I felt like he had just lost his way and gone off the rails, but the examples I thought about citing are hard to understand without context.

There are enough nuggets of brilliance to make this worth reading, but it could have used more vision in its plot, and ended up being just so-so for me.

These quotes are brilliant though:
On colonialism:
“…Haitian refugees should follow the precedent set by white people and simply discover Florida or Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever. They could come ashore, and start converting people to voodooism. It’s a widely accepted principle…that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: ‘We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it…’”

On humanity:
“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages – they haven’t ended yet.”

From the husband of a victim of gun violence:
“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.
There is evil for you.
We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.
I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

On life, and America:
“If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is. Some people, of course, find inhabiting an epilogue so uncongenial that they commit suicide. Ernest Hemingway comes to mind. … This could be true of nations, too. Nations might think of themselves as stories, and the stories end, but life goes on. Maybe my own country’s life as a story ended after the Second World War, when it was the richest and most powerful nation on earth, when it was going to ensure peace and justice everywhere, since it alone had the atom bomb.”

On meaninglessness:
“The corpse was a mediocrity who had broken down after a while. The mourners were mediocrities who would break down after a while. … The planet itself was breaking down. It was going to blow itself up sooner or later anyway, if it didn’t poison itself first. … There in the back of the church, I daydreamed a theory of what life was all about. I told myself that Mother and Felix and the Reverend Harrell and Dwayne Hoover and so on were cells in what was supposed to be one great big animal. There was no reason to take us seriously as individuals. Celia in her casket there, all shot through with Drano and amphetamine, might have been a dead cell sloughed off by a pancreas the size of the Milky Way.”

On mommy issues:
“I have a tendency, anyway, to swoon secretly in the presence of nurturing women, since my own mother was such a cold and aggressively helpless old bat.”

And finally, this classic:
“To be is to do” – Socrates
“To do is to be” – Jean-Paul Sartre
“Do be do be do” – Frank Sinatra ( )

"The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol." ( )

This has tied with "Slaughterhouse-Five" as my favorite Vonnegut novel. Both emotionally wrenching and emotionally detached as only Vonnegut is capable. ( )

This one was painful. Even more darkly autobiographical than usual for a Vonnegut story. ( )

All Vonnegut is good stuff. ( )