It’s with extreme sadness that Shaking Through marks the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, inarguably one of the greatest writers in American literature. He died yesterday of brain injuries related to a recent fall.

There’s such a thing as damning someone with great praise, since phrases like “one of the greatest writers in American literature” often conjure images of “important” (i.e., stuffy) works.  There’s writing that calls attention to itself via its high-minded prose and academic meditations. There’s tweed-jacketed New England writing consumed with the idea of older men being attracted to younger women and fornicating like Rabbits outside the marriage bed (imagine that).

And then there’s Vonnegut’s writing, which was almost anti-”writing”: It’s a cliché to call his style “conversational,” but suffice it to say that one of his gifts was the ability to tackle subjects as weighty and overdone as mortality, as prickly as war (his experiences during World War II and the bombing of Dresden formed the basis of Slaughterhouse-Five, and in later years he was sharply critical of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq) and politics (he was heavily influenced by early socialist leaders like Eugene Debs), in the most natural, simple prose, as rambling as one of Columbo’s interrogations and simultaneously as brutally direct as an intervention. He had a knack for leavening bitter ironies with gentle wit; for mining pathos and anger and love and sentimentality and outrage and fear without diluting the potency of any of them. He grappled with the grim truths of present-day reality, the unknowable future and the often-inescapable forces of everyday 20th-century living (technology, history, religion, war, society) with a seemingly lackadaisical, even whimsical air, a deadpan gaze and a rueful sigh.

 That he often did so while laboring within a framework of fantastical science-fiction conventions (such as in Slaughterhouse-Five, about a man named Billy Pilgrim who becomes “unstuck in time” — a metaphor for our inability to control our fates? – or Cat’s Cradle, with its ice-nine, or The Sirens of Titan or Slapstick) is all the more notable; in fact, the closest he had to an alter-ego was science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout (said to be modeled after sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon), who could only find work for pornographic magazines (draw your own metaphors here about writing for an audience that doesn’t know what to make of you).

Vonnegut’s most popular work was noted for its random feel, its penchant for non-sequiturs, but he always knew exactly what he was saying. One of his most popular books, the startlingly insinuating Breakfast of Champions, was peppered with crude illustrations, but his thoughts, themes, concepts and beliefs were sharply delineated. His books are worth rediscovering, and his voice will be missed. So it goes.

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