Kurt Vonnegut introduces his seventh novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five” (Delacorte), apologetically, calling it a failure. Coming from most writers, an apology like that would be inadequate; a writer can always take a vow of permanent abstinence from writing, and there is a shortage of cabdrivers. Mr. Vonnegut’s penitential gesture is objectionable because it implies that he might have succeeded in solving a problem that he properly represents as insoluble. In 1945, a German prisoner of war, he lived through the American and British bombing of Dresden, in which a hundred and thirty-five thousand people died—nearly twice as many, he notes, as were killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, whose devastation was at least officially honored by a Presidential announcement. “Slaughterhouse-Five” is Vonnegut’s tribute to the strain imposed on his conscience by the fact that he survived, and by his increasing awareness, since the war, of the scope and variety of death. The vibrant simplicity of the book to which he finally surrendered his emotion makes his apology seem disingenuous, like Alexander the Great putting himself down for not dedicating his life to untying the Gordian knot. Besides, any book that is touted as a “masterpiece,” “long-awaited,” and “twenty years in the making” can’t be all bad if it turns out to be just a neat hundred and eighty-six pages long.

Acknowledging the rich past and the bright prospects of death, Vonnegut cuts through his prodigious obsession with calculated diffidence, offering a lament and a protest in the disguise of a fable with no moral. To account for his show of coolness, he invents an alter-planetary civilization called Tralfamadore, in which all events, including death, are perceived simultaneously rather than in succession. The hypothetical consequence of such a mode of perception is the ability to focus exclusively on pleasant moments and to be indifferent to the unpleasant ones, such as death. The evangelist on Earth of the Tralfamadorian doctrine is a character named Billy Pilgrim, whose war experience matches Vonnegut’s own and whose fortuitous encounter with the Tralfamadorians produces the catchphrase that Vonnegut uses to mark each reference to death in the book:

“When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition at that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’ ”

The inanity of the phrase suggests how futile it is to try to discover an appropriate response to either a single death or a hundred and thirty-five thousand. Vonnegut exploits it shrewdly, counting here and there on the reader to resist pure fatalism, and elsewhere depending on the reader’s fatalistic sense of humor:

And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. . . . A German soldier with a flashlight went down into the darkness, was gone a long time. When he finally came back, he told a superior on the rim of the hole that there were dozens of bodies down there. They were sitting on benches. They were unmarked. So it goes. . . . So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes. . . . They were going to discuss whether the novel was dead or not. So it goes. . . . “How—how does the Universe end?” said Billy. “We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” So it goes.

In the opening chapter, Vonnegut vouches for the truth of the Second World War characters and incidents in “Slaughterhouse-Five” and then proceeds to demonstrate, by exchanging feeling for outer-spatial detachment, how outrageous the truth is. Under cover of the bland narration, the facts and the science fiction are equally plausible, but blandness gives characters like the crazy colonel and the forty-year-old ex-hobo an edge over the Tralfamadorians, who are, after all, green and shaped like plungers. Vonnegut concedes the difference, in effect, by interrupting the story of Billy Pilgrim twice to say, “I was there.”

The short, flat sentences of which the novel is composed convey shock and despair better than an array of facts or effusive mourning. Still, deliberate simplicity is as hazardous as the grand style, and Vonnegut occasionally skids into fatuousness—in his apology, for example, and when he addresses his publisher by name, and in this passage: