Fifty years have passed since the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. It’s the same age as me. And the older I get, and the more lumps fall off my brain, the more I find that rereading is the thing. Build your own little cockeyed canon and then bear down on it; get to know it, forward and backward; get to know it well. So I don’t know how many times I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five. Three? Four? It never gets old, is the point. It never wanes in energy. This book is in no way the blossom of a flower. Slaughterhouse-Five is more in the nature of a superpower that the mutant author had to teach himself to master—and then could use, at full strength, only once.

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The self-training took decades. The mutating event was, as always, brief. Between February 13 and February 15, 1945, Allied bombers dropped nearly four thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the historic German city of Dresden. The effect was elemental: Air became fire. Vonnegut, an American prisoner of war, was there—but 60 feet underground. Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, conveyed to Dresden by boxcar, and billeted in a derelict slaughterhouse as the bombs fell, he was sheltering with some fellow POWs and a couple of dazed German guards in a basement meat locker. They emerged to rubble, ash, twisted metal, death. Somewhere between 18,000 and 25,000 people (we still don’t know) had been killed.

The innumerability and anonymity of this mass death was in contrast to the one very unique and countable corpse that Vonnegut already had in his life—that of his mother, who had died by suicide less than a year before. How did this bereaved and half-starved young man, stepping out into the necropolis of Dresden, manage not to lose his mind? Native resilience, or ontological elasticity, or something else again—his writerly atman maybe, the eternal indestructible essence that blinked its turtle eyes behind all his ironies and observations.

It took him, anyway, 25 years to figure out what to do. There’s a haunting sentence in Charles J. Shields’s Vonnegut biography, And So It Goes: “How to write about a tremendous event of war that he had been there for, and yet had not been there for, because he was suspended underground?” There but not there, midair but buried—suspended underground. This is the limbo zone of Wilfred Owen’s 1918 poem “Strange Meeting,” the behind-the-trenches half-world that the poet enters in a dream or in death: “It seemed that out of battle I escaped / Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped.” In the end Vonnegut had no choice. To get out of the tunnel, he had to write a book about the impossibility of writing a book about Dresden. About the impossibility of even holding a continuous idea of Dresden in your head.