08. Deadeye Dick (1982)

We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. I give you a holy word: DISARM.

Deadeye Dick sees Vonnegut taking on the hypocrisy of gun owners, the police, and the larger concept of crime and punishment in America. “Deadeye Dick” is the nickname bestowed on protagonist Rudy Waltz after he, as a child, fires off his father’s shotgun and accidentally kills a pregnant woman. The abuse hurled at the “murderer” Rudy for his actions, from those who believe themselves to be good and caring Christian citizens, is so disturbingly reflective of reality that it is hardly even satire. Those who break the law, due far more to circumstance than their own failings, are never allowed to forget it and are forced to carry that shame with them wherever they go. Vonnegut is sharp in his critique of a society obsessed with violence and full of sanctimonious hypocrites.

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07. Timequake (1997)

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation’s wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

1997’s Timequake is only somewhat a novel: It was Vonnegut’s last formal work of fiction, and it contains chunks of autobiographical opinions and memories woven throughout the basic framing of a novel about humankind being forced to relive the years of 1991 to 2001 with no free will. But reading it now in 2017 would still be a sound choice, in part because of how it has aged. Timequake is a pre-9/11 book that accidentally allows you to imagine what humankind would be like if we really had been roused from 10 full years of living life from the passenger’s side only seven months before 9/11. It also give you the chance to remind yourself what it looked like to express, during the Clinton administration, the strongly anti-war outlook that Vonnegut, a World War II veteran, maintained throughout his entire life. War is war even if our president is a democrat. Amidst the scraps of his sci-fi premise, Vonnegut offers endless wisdom, including an argument that the inventor of the Hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, deserved his Nobel Peace Prize far less than his wife Elena Bonner, who was a pediatrician.

If I were giving you a recommendation, I would tell you to chase Timequake with A Man Without a Country to see just how powerfully Vonnegut rises to the occasion of critiquing America during the Bush administration.

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06. The Sirens of Titan (1959)

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

The plot of Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut’s second novel and arguably most successful fusion of science fiction and cultural philosophy, is elaborate and far-flung. Vonnegut described it as a “space opera,” and its scope is enormous, spanning millennia and infinite light-years.

Though it’s harder to find direct parallels to modern society, I am driven to include Sirens of Titan toward the front half of this list, which may seem confusing until you consider it as, like I mentioned before, a philosophy book within the structure of an elaborate, absurdist science-fiction novel. Every single line of Sirens of Titan contains philosophy, every scene serves to illuminate truths about humanity and belief systems. It is, at its core, about humanity’s search for meaning, and it interrogates the instinct for that search on every level, micro to macro. It is the wittiest book to ever tackle the question of why we exist, and somehow its answer has been, to many, more satisfying than foundational philosophical and religious texts.

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05. Jailbird (1979)

You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!

The significance of a faux-memoir of “Watergate’s least-known co-conspirator” in 2017 should be lost to few. In Jailbird, Walter F. Starbuck, an incompetent but not necessarily malicious man lacking originality in his ideologies and behaviors, attempts to do good but ultimately is an aid to other semi-competent and definitely malicious men. If Breakfast of Champions is a 1970s novel in the worst way, 1979’s Jailbird is a novel of the decade in the best way, as it offers up a solid history of the American labor movement while skewering capitalist society, McCarthyist extremism, and corporate America at large. One particularly juicy and resonant gag is the ever-present RAMJAC Corporation, which by 1977 in the novel ultimately owns most every company in America and is referenced insistently throughout, a la “the McDonald’s Hamburgers Division of RAMJAC.”

Upon its release, the New York Times Book Review called Jailbird “Vonnegut’s Sermon on the Mount.” In 2017, Jailbird’s heartfelt (and logical!) compassion wrapped in bitter satirical observation is still very much needed, as our country is led by what Lindy West has smartly referred to as perhaps the least caring party our country has ever seen.

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04. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage.

An examination of the absurdity of American wealth, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was written in the early 1960s, and income inequality has only grown more extreme in the half-decade since.

The novel’s protagonist, Eliot Rosewater, receives 3.5 million dollars a year from a “Foundation” that was set up by his father, a wealthy senator, in order for those of the Rosewater name to avoid paying taxes. So, that should sound familiar. Why we should allow self-interested millionaires to represent us in our government, and why the wealthy in this country do so much to avoid responsibility for themselves and others, are questions Vonnegut was asking in 1965 that are just as salient, and depressing, as they were back then.

Eliot Rosewater feels very guilty about all that he has been given, and attempts, in multiple ways, to literally spread the wealth. This is a book that I imagine Bernie Sanders likes quite a lot, as he and all progressive should. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a clear-eyed, direct satire of wealth and a proud endorsement of progressive and socialist values, and it is necessary reading.

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03. Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.

When it seems like the apocalypse is looming, turn to Cat’s Cradle. It feels, these days, like there are a thousand different ways our country and our planet can go the way of the ice-nine-induced armageddon that closes out Cat’s Cradle, and the novel gives you a model for how to face it with a wry smile.

There are layers upon layers of contemporary wisdom to be found in Cat’s Cradle’s fully fleshed out, imagined religion of Bokononism, led by a prophet who openly admits to telling only lies and followed eagerly by disciples who willingly embrace the lies, which enhance their lives. Neither a condemnation nor endorsement of religion and belief systems more broadly, Cat’s Cradle simply offers an explanation for them, insightful and cutting as it may be. Vonnegut was an observer, and one of his very favorite subjects, much to our benefit as readers, was the social impulse to gather and follow, to be led by charismatic, evangelizing liars. This impulse can be beneficial or harmless or dangerous, but it is, Vonnegut seemed to believe, pretty much unavoidable.

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02. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’”

It is in Slaughterhouse-Five that Vonnegut uses stand-in fictional characters and a science-fiction subplot to tell the truth about his experiences as a prisoner of war during the WWII bombing of Dresden.

Soldiers sent to wars are children, as are the innocent civilians who are killed. The more I grow to understand how I process trauma, the clearer I see the iconic “so it goes” statement that follows each death in Slaughterhouse-Five as a coping mechanism. Many acknowledged it as an artfully spare elegy, and it’s certainly not not that, but it’s also the only way to move forward. It’s an acknowledgement that we should be allowed to process death in an extended, human way, but that death, and especially death in war, comes so constantly that we are not able to. The “so it goes” are the millions of placeholders for grief that we know we will never be able to return to and attend to in any adequate way.

America remains as militaristic as ever, and as conflicts and wars across the globe grow bloodier by the day, engaging with the antiwar language of Slaughterhouse-Five remains absolutely critical.

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01. Mother Night (1961)

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

It’s from Mother Night that Vonnegut shares what is arguably his most important, most unassailable piece of advice: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

The protagonist of Mother Night, Howard Campbell Jr., was a member of the Nazi party, but not really, you see. He was a public voice for hateful Nazi propaganda, but it’s more complicated than that. See, Campbell was an American writer who grew up in Germany and became a writer and radio broadcaster for the Nazi party. However, he was also a somewhat passive US counter-intelligence agent, told that all of his behaviors, his word choice, his pauses on air, were communicating critical messages — the contents of which Campbell never learned — to the US government. His counter-intelligence work allows him to avoid jail time after the war, but of course it’s secret. To the general public, to the Russian and Israeli governments, to a white supremacist organization that uses Campbell as a figurehead, he is a Nazi.

With the election of Donald Trump and the rise of the alt-right, Americans must grapple now more than ever with questions about who they really are and who they are pretending to be. Where is the evidence? What does it look like has happened? Does it matter if, deeply and secretly, something else was going on? But was it even? We are a racist, bigoted, divided America. Vonnegut knew how hard humans try to avoid confronting the damage they have done, to justify their decisions as being the right ones even despite evidence. Mother Night is his statement on that.