Review: ‘And So It Goes’

December 4, 2011
Review: ‘And So It Goes’

Fascinating exploration of dark complexities and the literary influences of Kurt Vonnegut By STEVE ALMOND (Boston Globe) Kurt Vonnegut had a chip on his shoulder when it came to the critics. Despite being one of the most popular writers of his generation, he routinely complained that his work was overlooked, or miscast as high-concept, middle-brow fiction. The publication of Charles J. Shields’s fascinating new biography, “And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life,’’ probably won’t put this beef to rest, at least among his loyalists. But it does provide a definitive and disturbing account of the late author, whose ambition and talent transformed him from an obscure science fiction writer to a countercultural icon. As he demonstrated in his bestselling Harper Lee biography “Mockingbird,’’ Shields is an exhaustive researcher with a knack for prose that is absorbing without being flamboyant. He captures the peculiar and troubling dynamics of the Vonnegut clan, in which Kurt, the youngest of three, “couldn’t seem to say anything important enough to get the attention he craved at home.’’ His mother, Edith, we learn, was a fragile and emotionally remote woman whose sanity dissolved along with the family fortune. She harbored dreams of becoming a writer

Read more »

Vonnegut’s Atomic Bow-Tie

December 4, 2011
Vonnegut’s Atomic Bow-Tie

From WRITING KURT VONNEGUT Mark Vonnegut has said that the father he knew growing up wasn’t a famous author. He was a family man, a struggling freelance writer, who couldn’t get a job teaching English at the local community community college. And that’s not to mention his father’s disastrous foray into selling SAAB automobiles on Cape Cod, either— another of Kurt’s attempts to make money. For almost twenty years before the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, Vonnegut was broke most of the time. (Someone claiming to be his newsboy told me Kurt “hid” at the end of every month rather than pay what he ow ed for delivery.) How much he needed a big break and the comfort of money is evident in a curious tale, here told for the first time: Vonnegut’s idea for an atomic bow-tie (alas, an anecdote that didn’t make final draft of the biography). In 1950, he was sure that a bow-tie polka-dotted with the symbol for nuclear energy would be a big seller, and provide additional income he...

Read more »

Interview: “New Books in Biography” Podcast

December 4, 2011
Interview: “New Books in Biography” Podcast

by OLINE EATON The public image of Kurt Vonnegut is that of a crusty, irascible old man.  Someone with whom one would want to drink, but never ever fall in love. The Vonnegut we meet in Charles J. Shields’ insightful new biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life (Henry Holt, 2011), is much the same. However, in Shields’s capable hands, Vonnegut’s crustiness is cast in a new light, and his black humor is leavened by the humanist sensibilities it cloaked. With the icon stripped away, we’re left to confront a real human being, and a life that was provocative in ways one might not imagine. There are nearly 1,900 citations in And So It Goes, a fact that belies the book’s incredible readability. As a rave review in the New York Times noted, this is not a stodgy affair, but “an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography.” Shields eloquently tracks the soap operatic elements in the iconoclastic writer’s life, while also offering acute analysis on his private self and celebrity persona. And...

Read more »

Vonnegut Biographer’s Labor of Love

December 4, 2011
Vonnegut Biographer’s Labor of Love

By DAVID MAURER (Charlotteville Daily Progress) With dilemma-type dreams haunting his nights, and the pain of losing a friend troubling his days, Charles J. Shields was losing sleep and weight. The biographer’s distress started in early April 2007, when he spotted an eight-inch newspaper headline in an airport terminal. It read, “American Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Dead at Age 84.” The handful of words laid waste to Shields’ literary blueprint for penning the first biography of the famous author. They also delivered a hard, emotional punch to his gut. “Of course, I was saddened by the loss of a man I had come to think of as a friend,” said Shields, who lives with his wife in Barboursville. “I was caught in a state of unease, because I had lost my subject and we were working so well together. “I felt I could go on, but it was about three months before I could put my heart back into the project. I was having unhappy dreams about seeing him in places and wanting to ask...

Read more »

Review: ‘How It Went’

November 25, 2011

By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY (New York Times) Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, but one gets the sense from Charles J. Shields’s sad, often heartbreaking biography, “And So It Goes,” that he would have been happy to depart this vale of tears sooner. Indeed, he did try to flag down Charon the Ferryman and hitch a ride across the River Styx in 1984 (pills and booze), only to be yanked back to life and his marriage to the photographer Jill Krementz, which, in these dreary pages, reads like a version of hell on earth. But then Vonnegut’s relations with women were vexed from the start. When he was 21, his mother successfully committed suicide — on Mother’s Day. It’s a truism that comic artists tend to hatch from tragic eggs. But as Vonnegut, the author of zesty, felicitous sci-fi(esque) novels like “Cat’s Cradle” and “Sirens of Titan” and “Breakfast of Champions” might put it, “So it goes.” Vonnegut’s masterpiece was “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the novelistic account of being present at the destruction of Dresden by firebombing in 1945....

Read more »

Social Widgets powered by AB-WebLog.com.