Jailbird

Vonnegut shines in this novel, as he explores cold war America and its attitudes towards various things such as Communism, the Watergate scandal, and international conglomerates.

Some of Vonnegut's defining features come out in this. Namely, from the Vonnegut I have read, his main characters are not always the most likeable characters, and their attitudes towards love, death, sex, and money are not sympathetic. Vonnegut is a natural humanist, and explores the human condition interestingly with Jailbird's Walter Starbuck.

Another thing that Vonnegut does well is his jumping between time seamlessly. While not as aggressive as Slaughterhouse-Five, this work still does jump around, from Walter Starbuck's time at Harvard, to his marriage, and show more his time in prison, Vonnegut connects settings and times very well. He does this by using continuity of language and attitude throughout, so that he simply has to tell the readers where in the timeline they are, and they can jump right in.

I'm a historian, at least in study, and this is a very nice, relatively accurate telling in my opinion. Loved the tenacity with which Vonnegut goes about dissecting post WW2 America, and love that he does through the eyes of a former communist turned Vice President of a sector of an international conglomerate. show less

My 4th perfect score i've given to a book & guess what!
This is my 3rd Vonnegut book of those 4 (the only other book, Zealot, is nonfiction, meaning that all 3 fiction books i've given perfect scores are Vonnegut: this, SH5 & The sirens of titan).
As I said to Joe when recommending & trying to explain this book, any explanation of this story is like unfolding a beautiful origami swan into a crumpled piece of paper and pointing at the random creases saying "Thisss was where the eye was! and this crimp right here was a wing tip".
The way this interlaces history & far right political views (or as Vonnegut says "common sense") with a fractured Vonnegutian narrative + his beautiful, human-first approach to life and everything. An approach I show more always feel i can learn more from each time I read him & one i admire so dearly!
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut (or Pearls before Swine)! show less

Damn, I love Vonnegut! This is (I think) considered a lesser work, and still I found it to be profoundly enjoyable. Sacco & Vanzetti; Watergate; homelessness; all rolled up in Vonnegut's style of storytelling.
Here's just one of the passages that bowled me over:
So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitress everybody was "honeybunch" and "darling" and "dear." It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again.
As Vonnegut might say (and does, in this novel, as an show more echo of "So it goes"): Strong stuff. show less

Jailbird begins as a story about a man who has been jailed for having a very insignificant part in the Watergate scandal. Because of this, he is housed in a jail for white collar criminals near Atlanta, Georgia. The story traces his past beginning with his childhood as the son of two servants for the wealthy McCone family and continues on to tell about his life as a Harvard student and role in the HUAC hearings among other things.

I found the book to be characteristic of Vonnegut in that it is filled with his trademark wit and dark humor. The reader wants to root for the protagonist to find some sort of fulfillment in life in a world that Vonnegut portrays as being very silly and senseless. Through humorous portrayals of the US show more government and corporations, Vonnegut provides a scathing mockery of the US economic system and how inhuman we all become within it.

I liked this book even though I doubt that Vonnegut and I would agree on a lot of things politically. Regardless of how you feel about the American version of the capitalist system, you have to admit that at many times Vonnegut does point out some of the absurdities of it. Likewise, as I previously mentioned, he does write in such a way as to make you want to root for the protagonist and hope that he gets some sort of justice in his life even though, after comparisons are frequently made to Sacco and Vanzetti, that this isn't likely to happen for him. show less

It's not shocking that in Palm Sunday, the "autobiographical collage" Vonnegut compiled/wrote immediately after publishing Jailbird, he grades this book as an A.

While this one came first, Jailbird shares a great deal in common with 1985's Galápagos -- specifically, that both novels take place over the course of one very star-crossed day (with numerous forwards- and backwards-looking references, of course), and that both deal with the nastiness of human nature in a surprisingly endearing way. Here, we have Walter F. Starbuck, who epitomizes the good man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time throughout his life, who begins the novel leaving prison after serving his sentence for his involvement in Watergate and ends it about to show more return to prison for concealing a will.

In between, we meet a huge amount of horrible people, and some good ones too, all of whom have contributed to Walter's downfall. Despite it all, he's still a good man (a Vonnegutian man, no doubt), and the novel is saved from potential jadedness by the devil-may-care sweetness of its main character. Still, that such awfulness happens to such a good man is troublesome, and by the end, that's the entire point.

Human horridness never looked so good. show less

I began reading this book just after finishing Anna Karenina and I am glad I did. It was essentially everything Anna Karenina was not (in a good way).

The prose was classic Vonnegut, light, fast paced and strangely hilarious. I look at Vonnegut as many look upon their grandfathers. There are the same corny jokes you've come to expect and despite their corniness you can't help but laugh and be pleased with them.

Jailbird was particularly interesting and at the same time confusing for me. The tale gets wrapped up in just as many historical events as it does fictional and there is also the mention and inclusion of many notable figures from the past 100 or so years.

In the end it doesn't matter where fact and fiction cross or where they show more diverge. The book was fun and seemingly lighthearted and like Vonnegut always does he make some serious points.

Here is a quote, that given our current economic crisis seems perfect:

"The economy is a thoughtless weather system-- and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing."

I think we are slowly realizing that we are the butt of this joke show less

It strikes me, not for the first time whilst reading Vonnegut that writers can be divided into two camps. The ones who have to work to include that smart-arse-clever line/sentence/phrase they jotted down somewhere, sometime and really really need to get in. Who was it who said that the more you like something you've written down, the more likely it is that you should take it out? And the ones who, even if what they say hits you with a jolt - and Vonnegut's lines often do that - they nonetheless fit in. They aren't forced, they naturally belong just there where the reader sets upon them. There is a hilarious Kilgore Trout story about Einstein trying to get into heaven in Jailbird. He goes through an audit first and then:

Rest here: show more target="_top">http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/09/01/jailbird-by-kurt-vonnegut/ show less