“If Vonnegut could see through myths about war, why couldn’t he transcend myths about sexual violence?”
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If I were to draw my (aspirational) literary family tree, I'd claim Kurt Vonnegut for my grandfather. A lot of this has to do with Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut's masterpiece about the fire-bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut witnessed the atrocity firsthand: during WWII, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war were holed up in a bunker while every living being in Dresden was ruined by fire. As Vonnegut writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." Vonnegut worked on the book for twenty years. The finished product features space aliens who refute the concept of free will and a protagonist who comes unstuck in time.
Vonnegut broke all the rules.
It worked.
In his essay, "Mr. Vonnegut in Sumantra," George Saunders recounts reading Slaughterhouse Five while working as an engineer on an oil rig. Before Vonnegut, Saunders thought good writing had to be dense and inscrutable. Vonnegut's use of humor and vernacular was a shock—a sign. Saunders writes, "This guy who had been in the belly of the beast wrote as if he were still, like me, a regular person from the Midwest." Vonnegut also taught Saunders—then an Ayn Rand acolyte—that it's cool to be kind:
Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness—a simple, idiotic failure of belief in the human, by men and their systems—had been the cause of [the war], and that what he had learned from this experience was not the importance of being tough and hard and untouchable, but the importance of preserving kindness in ourselves at all costs.
What Vonnegut did for Saunders, Saunders did for me. I wasn't an engineer on an oil rig when I read Saunders's "The Four Hundred Pound CEO." I was a sophomore in a fiction writing workshop. I made up for my mundane milieu by having an existential crisis every fifteen minutes. My collapsing inner life was not buoyed by the short fiction I read, which universally depicted numb, passive, characters making ugly moral choices. In this dreary landscape, Saunders's "The Four Hundred Pound CEO" was a hilarious beacon of hope. While the story was dark—the obese protagonist ends up the prison wife of an abusive thug who forces him to wear a lady's fruit brimmed hat—it was suffused with longing: longing to be a good person. Longing for a more compassionate world.
The story had a soul.
Seven years later (after a failed stint as a social worker on the South Texas border) I was in George Saunders's workshop on my way to an MFA at Syracuse. For those of you who wonder if George Saunders in person lives up to the kindness, humanity, and humor in his writing: Yes. George Saunders, the person, is equivalent in awesomeness to George Saunders, the writer. When he won the MacArthur Genius grant, Saunders responded by making fun of himself for dropping his toothbrush in the toilet. Grad students one-upped each other with stories of Saunders's human decency: The time Saunders brought us cupcakes on his birthday. The time Saunders wrote a recommendation letter to help a Somali refugee score a job at UPS. The time Saunders ran outside a restaurant to do the Heimlich maneuver on a choking homeless man.
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