Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night
So, Mother Night is the third pick in Anthony Jeselnik’s bookclub. As I mentioned toward the end of my writeup on Paradais, I’m generally pretty familiar with Vonnegut’s work. In hindsight, that’s not saying much. I’ve read a few of his short stories (I think everyone who grew up in the 1980s got “Harrison Bergeron” assigned to them in a high school English class), and I’ve read Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. And…that’s it. Considering his output that’s pretty pathetic on my part.
Stylistically, Mother Night was quite the palette cleanser after the rollicking stream-of-conscious style of Paradais. Vonnegut’s prose, at least here, lacks adornment. That’s not a criticism. We often use “writer” as a synonym for “storyteller,” but they’re not quite the same thing. I think of an anecdote that Alec Guinness tells about first reading the Star Wars script. He says something to the effect that he thought the dialogue wasn’t great but that he felt compelled to keep turning the page. That’s the difference between a writer and a storyteller in a nutshell. A great writer may give you truly beautiful, breathtaking prose, but the story just feels leaden. Meanwhile, a novelist like Dan Brown (who no one is going to call a masterful stylist) apparently has that special instinctive storytelling ability that keeps you reading even if the writing itself kind of sucks on the technical level.
Mother Night is a simple story with interesting themes about self-identity and self-worth. In the context of The Getaway and Paradais, I’d argue there’s also an umbrella theme going on about the nature of criminality and the inevitable price that has to be paid. Vonnegut’s narrator becomes determined to pay that price, even when he’s politically exonerated. The reasons for his decision could be guilt, but came across to me a world weary exhaustion. There’s arguably a bit of a cop-out in the exoneration itself, which we’ve been assured won’t be coming.
The novel focuses on an American writer who grew up in Germany in the lead-up to Hitler’s ascendancy. He married a German woman, became a dramatist and then a notorious radio propagandist, a sort of Nazi version of Tokyo Rose. I have no idea if Vonnegut used a real person as his inspiration for this character. One of the best parts of the book is the question of whether terrible deeds done without conviction are worse than deeds performed by true believers, even if the beliefs are sinister and perverted. This all hinges on a plot twist regarding the narrator that’s mirrored by the other major characters, who are all engaged in some kind of subterfuge and assumed identity. The unexpected exoneration that comes at the end plays into all of this, with the letter writer revealing both truth about himself and the truth of the narrator’s actions. It’s as if humanity is always determined to assert itself, and as the narrator’s own humanity is finally realized, it leads him to destroy himself as an act of penitence.
(All of this is assuming the American is a reliable narrator, but I don’t think Vonnegut was leading us to call the various assertions into question).
Another of the novel’s more interesting aspects is the role of romantic love in our lives, which can be used to push darker realities away or even serve as a self-serving justification for actions done to preserve an idealized fantasy bubble. At the same time, we’re given the brief backstory of a white supremacist who apparently loses all interest in publishing hateful tracts while he’s married, suggesting romantic love can divert or nullify darker impulses.
Overall, an enjoyable novel. Much like Paradais, I’m not sure I’d pick it up again, though I feel there’s quite a bit more meaning to tease out and explore than the brief summation I’ve given here. I’m excited to see what Jeselnik picks for April.
