Deadeye Keith

Read from Thursday, January 27th to Sunday, January 30th.

Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite author.  He has been my favorite for many years now, and I consider Slaughterhouse Five to be my favorite book.  Deadeye Dick is the last novel by him that I have yet to own or read.  Vonnegut books exist in their own special world, and I love his deadpan black humor and quick, biting thoughts about the world and humanity and its cruelty.  Deadeye Dick was not my favorite Vonnegut book, but it did fit his traditional formula, and you can't mess up too much a sure thing. 

Deadeye Dick is the story of Rudy Waltz, who earned that unfortunate nickname as a kid when he shot a gun off his roof, and the stray bullet killed a pregnant woman vacuuming.  It is the seminal moment of his life, and he narrates his life story as a 50 year old man living in a hotel in Haiti.  His family was wrecked after that incident, so Rudy devoted his life to serving his incompetent parents.  His dad was a former friend of Hitler, a failed artist and eccentric, a gun collector, and a rich know-it-all in the small city of Midland.  But that was before the shooting, and he took the blame for his son, spent some time in jail, lost his money, and ended up just moping around the house all day with his wife.  Rudy's brother Felix fought in WWII, and was president of NBC for a time.  He had six wives, and ended up moving to Haiti with his brother. 

Rudy spent his life repenting for his crime.  He called himself a neuter, neither hetero or homosexual, just not interested in sex altogether.  He cooked and cleaned for his parents, while working the night shift as a pharmacist.  He wrote a play about a friend of his fathers who left Ohio for the Himalayas, looking for Shangri-La.  The play won a prize and was performed on Broadway, but was a huge flop.  His dad died, and he lived with his mom, but she soon died from a radioactive mantlepiece.  After that, he bought a hotel in Haiti, and just in time, because Midland City was destroyed accidentally by a neutron bomb.  It killed everyone but left all the structures intact.  Rudy and Felix get to tour this mausoleum city.  They reflect that it was a dying city anyway, and that nobody seems to miss it.  The government probably did it on purpose so they could give the structures to refugees from poor black countries, essentially creating a new slavery.  The buildings and things remained intact, so they kept everything important, right?

This is a book about the cruelty of people on all sides.  The isolation that people can feel even though they are surrounded.  It is about trying to find happiness, as in Shangri-La, or giving up completely and submitting to life.  It is a commentary on gun control, class structure, who is real and who is fake, nuclear arms, art, and perspectives.  Vonnegut's last lines are very direct.  "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages.  The Dark Ages-- they haven't ended yet."  Even though he was a prolific writer, I still wish the world had more Kurt Vonnegut, and actually listened to what he had to say.  Three and a half out of four stars.