Money Matters

By Paul Gray

JAILBIRD by Kurt Vonnegut Delacorte; 277 pages; $9.95

Fame has a way of ruining a writer's reputation. Take the case of Kurt Vonnegut, who became a cult figure in the late '60s after enduring years of hard-earned obscurity. A growing army of high school and college readers began proclaiming him a deep thinker, at about the same time that critics started cuffing him for being a shallow artist. Both judgments were wrong. Vonnegut has never written a thought that could not occur to a sporadically meditative teenager, nor has he pretended to; those who are impressed by the profundity of a shrug ("So it goes") have probably found the guru they deserve. At the same time, Vonnegut is one of the few truly original and distinctive stylists to emerge in the past 20 years. The clarity and apparent simplicity of his prose are sure signs of the craft that went into making it.

His best books are parables written out of anger at some inexplicable kink in the collective psyche: blind trust in science and scientists (Cat's Cradle); faith in war as a rational activity (Slaughterhouse-Five). After a lengthy period of mellowed-out serenity (and two mediocre novels, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick), Vonnegut is mad again. His target in Jailbird is money, specifically the odd systems that people have invented for distributing and withholding it.

Walter F. Starbuck, Vonnegut's hero and narrator, keeps getting his life sidetracked by great wealth. The son of immigrant servants, he was informally adopted by his parents' millionaire employer, raised as a gentleman and sent off to Harvard. In his early 60s, after an on-and-off career in Government service, he finds himself buried in an obscure job with the Nixon White House. So remote is his office that it becomes the perfect hiding place for a trunk containing a million dollars in unlaundered bills. Starbuck is sent off to a minimum-security prison in Georgia, the least heralded co-conspirator in all of Watergate. He muses later: "It was like being in a wonderful musical comedy where the critics mentioned everybody but me." No sooner is his two-year hitch in stir over than Starbuck runs afoul of more millions. He stumbles into a decrepit old shopping-bag lady in New York who turns out to be his sweetheart from Harvard days. She is also majority stockholder of the RAMJAC Corporation, a conglomerate that owns 19% of the U.S.

To complicate the unbelievable, she and Starbuck had been Communists in their youth. His zeal has withered with age, but not hers. "After I die," she tells Starbuck, "you look in my left shoe . . . You will find my will in there. I leave the RAMJAC Corporation to its rightful owners, the American people." Starbuck is dazzled by the purity of her motive but convinced that her act will make not one whit of difference to the way people live: "The economy is a thoughtless weather system -- and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing."

This plot is loose and baggy enough to give Vonnegut plenty of leg room, and he strolls about at will. He offers a lengthy account, for instance, of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and of their subsequent executions in the 1920s. Not all of the digressions are somber. Starbuck meets Nixon and finds the President's smile "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." The hero's meditations on money are childlike enough to produce odd insights. On his first morning of freedom, Starbuck leaves his seedy hotel to buy a newspaper. He then has an urge to call up the Secretary of the Treasury and tell him, "I just tried out two of your dimes on Times Square, and they worked like a dream. It looks like another great day for the coinage!" He hears a radio news broadcast and has another offbeat response: "The newscaster spoke with a barking sort of hilarity, as though life were a comical steeplechase, with unconventional steeds and hazards and vehicles involved. He made me feel that even I was a contestant -- in a bathtub drawn by three aardvarks, perhaps."

Such touches are vintage Vonnegut.

So, less happily, is the simple moral that runs through almost all of his work. As Starbuck puts it, "We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one." Yet Vonnegut does not believe that people are capable of doing so, at least not in a way that will make them happy. This leads to the static quality of his books: nothing much ever changes except to get a little worse. Some of the evidence Vonnegut offers is rigged: Starbuck comes to believe that wisdom does not exist and hence can not be used to improve the lot of man kind. "Who was the wisest man in the Bible, supposedly?" he asks and answers: "He was King Solomon, of course. Two women claiming the same baby appeared before Solomon, asking him to apply his legendary wisdom to their case. He suggested cutting the baby in two."End of argument. To which the only informed response must be, "Yes, but . . ."

It is possible to say both words, with equal emphasis, about much of Vonnegut's fiction. Jailbird is no exception. Still, it is his best book in years and may prompt a new generation of college kids to adopt the author and the novel. That act will, at the very least, teach them one important fact: reading can be fun.

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