Sunshine Recorder

Revisiting Vonnegut’s Cradle

A writer rereads the novel that began his interest in literature.

James Wood, writing in the New Republic, once called Vonnegut “unclassifiable” in the same breath that he grouped him alongside fellow “avant-gardists” turned “mainstreamists”: Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass. He has a point. Cat’s Cradle is at once science fiction and realist first-person narrative, political thriller and cranky litany against consumer culture, most of all a scathing comedy that is sadder than most Greek tragedies. In those contradictions lie its strength and the reason why, perhaps, the only canon it has been included in is 10th grade English class. Cat’s Cradle is out of place in postmodernism because, rather than just suggesting the end of the world — take the beautiful dance around the issue that Don Delillo performed in White Noise — Vonnegut makes the apocalypse tangible. It does not quite fit in the typical American literature since WWII survey — in which Bellow and Roth’s first-person novels of decline and impotence are the dominant literary forms — in part, because of its campy humor (the frozen dead dog, the fact that the closest the novel comes to approaching sex is the rubbing together of bare feet). Cat’s Cradle holds up not just as the book that makes people start reading, but also as serious fiction. It may continue to languish in high school hell, if only for the difficulty of placing it.