Broken Barrel

Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut’s 10th novel, has at its core a tragedy caused by gun violence. The book came out in 1982, at a time when American gun culture was a little different than now. But Vonnegut, disturbingly prescient, captured something that still looks familiar.

The book’s got more in it, too, but less than usual for a Vonnegut novel. It confines itself to normal human characters—no aliens, no ultrarich plutocrats—and to the everyday setting of a mostly-placid Midwestern town. Things take a bizarre turn at the very end, but while Vonnegut’s characters are well-observed, the book’s still less outright strange, and therefore less immediately engaging, than most of the rest of his novels.

It’s the life story of Rudy Walz, a native of Midland, Ohio. The son of an eccentric German-American father who failed as an artist and sympathized with the Nazis before World War II, at age 12 in a burst of pre-teen euphoria Rudy fires a gun from an upper story of the family home and unintentionally kills a pregnant woman. The book follows the consequences of this act through Rudy’s life. He becomes a “neuter,’ shunning sex and largely withdrawing from the world. He spends his life trying to do nothing and affect nobody, and largely succeeds.

Vonnegut’s always had a sense of inevitability. Here that’s wedded to a more general fatalism, a pessimistic naturalism depicting a world where tragedy’s foredoomed. If Rudy’s story is tragic, though, it’s not a grand tragedy; in fact, Rudy writes a tragic play that fails utterly in its New York opening. Deadeye Dick is instead melancholic, showing the grinding sadness of a life scarred by adolescent stupidity.

Vonnegut interpolates recipes into the story to represent Rudy’s destiny as a cook, ironically evoking community and culture. Rudy’s a solitary, but dining is a collective ritual, and recipes often proportioned to serve more than one. The structural gimmick of the recipes aside, the book’s mainly defined by a simplicity and spareness of language. There isn’t the narrative complexity or unpredictable surrealism of Vonnegut’s earlier work. The novel moves quickly, though, and implies much through its precision.

It starts like many of Vonnegut’s previous books, with a preface setting up the story and relating it to Vonnegut’s own life. That preface ends with a blunt statement of what elements in the book represent the main character as Vonnegut’s own declining sexuality, his crime as the bad things Vonnegut did in his youth. One may doubt that that’s everything there is to say about those elements.

It’s not that the allegory Vonnegut identifies isn’t there. It’s that the symbols in the book are much broader, which is why the story works. Rudy’s act, and subsequent events, have the effect of a myth, something that resists being nailed down to a single meaning.

Sex is clearly involved, on an emotional and symbolic level. Broader than Vonnegut’s own sexuality, though, that transgression is as fable-like as eating the apple in Eden while also being a specifically political action, an implicitly feminist uniting of male sexuality and gun violence.

But the book, and the crime at its center, also reaches out to past and future. The guns are there because of Rudy’s Nazi-sympathizer father. And the end of the story appears to replicate the crime on a larger scale; midtown’s wiped out by the accidental explosion of a neutron bomb.

(Or was it an accident? Vonnegut raises the question, in part to show how eager some are to doubt the official story; to show a paranoid strain in American life, a conspiratorial worldview waiting to emerge. It’s a sequence that’s chilling in the way it anticipates the 21st century of QAnon and Pizzagate, especially in the context of a story about guns.)

It’s tempting also to see the story as a parable about the failure of art. Rudy’s father tries to be a painter but has no talent, just like his art-school friend Adolf Hitler; Rudy tries to be a playwright and fails. Is the violence of the story a function of the banality of their lives?

The story tries to use Rudy’s story to grapple with America as a whole, in its politics and its tensions. Vonnegut writes about race, from Rudy’s perspective (and his own) as a white man who doesn’t give whiteness the status of universality. It's a book aware of otherness, and of America as a collection of others.

Unfortunately, there are some puzzling gaps. Even in a less media-saturated age, having Rudy’s brother become president of NBC is a set-up for something, drama or metaphor, that doesn’t happen. More generally, and unusually for Vonnegut, the book’s too normal. The emotional texture is too much that of the standard downbeat late-20th-century American literary novel. Better written, but without any structural wildness the flatness of the prose is less effective.

This is certainly a Vonnegut novel, with various connections to his past (and future) work. Midland, Ohio was the main setting for Breakfast of Champions, and some of the characters there recur here. There’s a mention of the RAMJAC corporation from Jailbird. A motif from Jailbird recurs, also, a mad older woman familiar to the protagonist now fallen on hard times.

Still, if the novel gains in focus and simplicity from the elimination of Vonnegut’s wilder satirical conceits, it loses some complexity of tone. The whole point of Rudy is that he’s a passive character, and Vonnegut doesn’t always overcome the difficulty of telling a long story about someone who wants little and doesn’t care to pursue what he does want. It’s far from a bad book, but it may be the least of Vonnegut’s novels.