Raisin d'Etre

By John Skow

WAMPETERS, FOMA & GRANFALLOONS

by KURT VONNEGUT JR.

285 pages. Delacorte/Seymour

Lawrence. $8.95.

The most distinctive voice in recent American fiction is that of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author of seven likable but sometimes hopelessly tacky novels and a couple of unsuccessful plays. In this collection of commencement speeches, book reviews and other shavings from under a busy writer's workbench, his tone has the usual rarefied diffusion of tiredness and rue. It may be time to ask why this tone is so attractive.

Tiredness is part of the answer. When Vonnegut writes, it is as if a favorite uncle had just driven 1,200 miles nonstop from Indianapolis, slugged down two stiff drinks, and collapsed on the sofa, body becalmed but mind still blasting along at 80 m.p.h., voice spinning on and on, talking of horrors with rumpled brilliance. In this strange mood of elation and exhaustion, there is no time or energy for calculation, artifice, rewriting (as it seems), or anything except the wild sputter of ideas and the sigh "So it goes."

Niceness is part of the answer. In this collection Vonnegut quotes a critic friend, who told him in exasperation that what Vonnegut does is put bitter coatings on sugar pills. This is perfectly true, and the sugar pill is Vonnegut's own character. He is (or makes himself seem) a kindly, decent fellow. When the young hear from him that the world is decaying, this message is to some extent reassuringly contradicted by his wry and understanding smile.

The way to enjoy Vonnegut is to pick out the raisins. The idea of writers' conferences is absurd, he says, because writers cannot confer; "it's all they can do to drag themselves past one another like great, wounded bears." That is a raisin. He reports without undue enthusiasm that his wife and daughter have become followers of the Maharishi. "Nothing pisses them off anymore," says Vonnegut. "They glow like bass drums with lights inside." Another raisin.

So Gloomy. There is a lot of solid, sad talk, and it makes the reader feel sorry that this gentle, tired uncle is so gloomy. "I have always thought of myself as a paranoid," he writes, "as an overreactor, and a person who makes a questionable living with his mental diseases." The arts, he believes, are benign frauds: "Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk ... Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on inside. And on and on."

If Vonnegut really were an uncle, the reader would take him to see The Sting, maybe, and buy him a couple of beers afterward to cheer him up. Or lose patience and tell him to pull up his socks. People really do feel this way about Vonnegut. A twelve-year-old boy wrote a letter after reading Breakfast of Champions, the author reports, saying, "Dear Mr. Vonnegut, Please don't commit suicide." Vonnegut says he is fine.

Nevertheless the idea of taking care of the author as a relative is surprisingly attractive. It is, in fact, a rather Vonnegutian idea. One of the fragments collected here proposes a sensibly loony scheme by which everyone in the country would get a new middle name and a lot of new relatives chosen arbitrarily by computer. The names would be words like Daffodil, Chromium, and so on, and they would signify clans. Each Daffodil would have 19,999 fellow clansmen spread out around the U.S. to be treated as relatives: to be cared for, cursed, feuded with, borrowed from, nursed, loved and hated. To be taken notice of in a human way is the author's idea, and it is by no means the worst idea put between hard covers this year.

"Wampeters," by the way, are objects (like the Holy Grail) around which the lives of otherwise unrelated people revolve. "Foma" are "harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls,"--such as "prosperity is just around the corner." A "granfalloon" is a "proud and meaningless association of human beings." As members of the Vonnegut granfalloon know, the words first appeared in one of Uncle Kurt's early novels, Cat's Cradle. . John Skow

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.