Kurt’s Cradle

Catch a wave, and you’re sittin’ on top of the world.

Photo of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. giving a speech

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1979

NEWSCOM

And catch that wave Kurt Vonnegut did, sitting on top of the world from the early 1960s until his death in 2007. Well, maybe not all the way to 2007. Even as early as the publication of his novel Galápagos, in 1985, the wave was clearly ebbing. But it had been a hell of a ride: over 20 years, during which Kurt Vonnegut drove his quicksilver board through the curl of American literature—our one great novelistic surfer, the dude who made it all look easy. The guy who made it all look cool.

It was 1963 when the Beach Boys recorded “Catch a Wave”—and 1963, as well, when a nearly failed proto-New Wave science-fiction writer named Kurt Vonnegut Jr. made a sudden leap up into mainstream public fame with the publication of a novel called Cat’s Cradle. It’s hard to say quite how the 41-year-old author managed the unpredictable jump. Among science-fiction writers his contemporary Philip K. Dick was (in his own peculiar way) a deeper thinker. The younger Roger Zelazny was slicker. The even-younger Tom Disch was cleverer.

Yes, Vonnegut had managed to produce Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959), and Mother Night (1961), but to read the Library of America’s new collection is to realize that, with Cat’s Cradle, he broke through the limitations of his previous work to find the pounding heart of the American moment—the central beat, the bam-bam pulse of it all. The book sparkled on the page. It popped and glistened, in prose that was some impossible mash of sophisticated and naïve, smart and silly, straightforward and bizarre.

“Call me Jonah,” it opens. “My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”