Petergiaquinta's Reviews > Jailbird

I don't mind so much the Republicans who embrace greed and general douche-baggery.

But it's those Republicans who cloak themselves in smug, moral self-righteousness, the ones who invoke God and think somehow Jesus would be on board with their selfish hypocrisy, that really annoy me.

In the intro to Jailbird, Vonnegut refers to a letter he had recently received from a high-school reader who told Vonnegut he had read almost everything by him and wanted to share the single idea he found at the core of Vonnegut's life work: "Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail." And he's right; that's the message at the heart of everything Vonnegut has written, including his recently published Letters. This most human and humane of authors who was an atheist and whose books have been burned by these same smug, sanctimonious conservative nutjobs has a better handle than they do on the gospel of Christ which, ironically enough, shares the same message you'll find in those books that were burned.

In the intro as well, Vonnegut relates a lunch he had as a young man still in uniform, recently back in the U.S. after WWII. The lunch was at a restaurant in Indianapolis with his uncle and father and a labor organizer named Powers Hapgood, who had attended Harvard with Vonnegut's uncle, who was politically rather conservative. Vonnegut had told his uncle that he was interested in a labor union job and instead of discouraging him, his uncle had arranged the lunch with his Harvard classmate. Hapgood had a colorful history; he had been jailed many times for his union activities, had led pickets at the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and in fact had just come to the restaurant after a morning of testifying in court about a labor case. The judge had asked him why a Harvard man like himself from a distinguished Indianapolis family had chosen to live the life he did. He told the judge, "Why? Because of the Sermon on the Mount, sir."

And I like that.

So I picked up Jailbird and just read it again, a book I first read maybe back in 1980 shortly after it was published, when I was the age of that fan who wrote Vonnegut the letter about the message at the core of his books. Having just finished Kurt Vonnegut's Letters, I remembered Jailbird as one of my least favorite Vonnegut books, and I wondered if maybe I had been too young to appreciate it at the time. I could barely remember Jailbird; I knew there was a bag lady and references to unions, but that was about it. Jailbird certainly hadn't become a part of my larger cultural consciousness, the way Cat's Cradle or SH-5 had. I had forgotten the title refers to the least significant of the Watergate conspirators, one Walter F. Starbuck, or that Kilgore Trout plays a minor role in this novel, too, as one of Starbuck's fellow prisoners in the minimum security facility in Georgia where Starbuck is being released after serving his sentence. I had forgotten that Roy Cohn even makes a cameo appearance. In fact, I had forgotten almost everything about this novel, except for the sense that I didn't really like it that much the first time, and so I'm glad I gave it a re-read.

I'm leaving my initial 3-star rating up there, although I'd be tempted to give the re-read 4 stars today. And I'm sure I enjoyed the book much more now than my 16-year-old self did, being older and wiser and more compassionate now that I'm almost 50, as well as a dues-paying member of a union. But it isn't as good as those earlier works by Vonnegut, and its message of treating others with kindness and civility probably comes across better in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Still, I'm a better person for re-reading it, and the recent anti-labor movements in places like Wisconsin and Michigan make Vonnegut's concerns in this novel all the more relevant today. And my copy of the novel has a photograph on the back of the dust jacket of Vonnegut sitting on the edge of a bed looking out the window and talking on the phone, wearing a stocking cap and smoking what I assume is a Pall Mall. On the window sill is a plate filled with smoked-out stubs. And I like that too.