Critical essays on Kurt Vonnegut /

Reading this fine assemblage of articles and reviews convinces one of Vonnegut's literary importance, despite two serious shortcomings of his: a weakness for fatuous, immature remarks and an artless, pulp-fiction writing style. These well-chosen essays show an author preoccupied with life's apparent lack of meaning and purpose , with war and human suffering, and with the precariousness of human psychological and physical survival. The topics covered here are so varied--Vonnegut's use of literary devices such as defamiliarization and the hero monomyth, of themes such as the artificially created extended family as a bulwark against loneliness--that Merrill's collection is eminently worthy of its many-sided subject. Notable among the well-documented longer studies: Merrill's introduction (a history of Vonnegut's critical reception), R. Scholes's 1967 essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Black Humor," D. Cowart's recent "Culture and Anarchy: Vonnegut's Later Career," and K. Hume's 1982 studies "Kurt Vonnegut and the Myth and Symbols of Meaning" and "The Heraclitean Cosmos of Kurt Vonnegut." Despite the lack of a biographical chronology and a bibliograpy, this book is strongly recommended for most libraries. -S. I. Bellman, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona