So It Goes

It always amuses me when a book or other media event that's supposed to be revelatory turns out to be completely unsurprising. This is the case with the new biography of Kurt Vonnegut So It Goes. I'm simply puzzled by the way numerous reviewers seem to be treating writer Charles J. Shields' account of some darker corners of Vonnegut's life as if it will somehow redefine the world's opinion of the man and his work.

This is just ridiculous, because no one who's actually read one of Vonnegut's novels should be shocked by the idea that the author wasn't a particularly nice person. That he passionately expressed deeply humanistic values in his work is beside the point. He may have hoped for the best, but this was a man who had directly experienced some of the worst history had to offer. Taken in context, the only shocking thing is that he had enough faith in humanity, however compromised it was, to even care about such things.

In any case, whether the stories in this new book are true or not (at least some of them are in dispute), it doesn't change one word of the books that made the author famous. With that in mind, my general reaction to the discussion surrounding this book is that it calls to mind one of Vonnegut's most famous quotes. In the introduction to Mother Night, while discussing the moral of the story, Vonnegut writes, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." So it goes.