“I’m going to love these discarded Americans, even though they’re useless and unattractive. That is going to be my work of art.”
So sayeth Eliot Rosewater, dubious hero and titular character of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1965 novel. It’s a philosophy that I think has quite a bit of resonance with Kurt Vonnegut’s own artistic preoccupations—“love” may not seem like an apt way to describe his often scathing takes on the foibles of post-war America, but just as Rosewater devotes his attentions and his copious inheritance to the kinds of people much of the world prefers to ignore, few other writers ever venture near Vonnegut’s pin-pointed observation of the intricacies of banality. For all that his novels are filled with bizarre, quirky and downright caricatured characters and scenarios, it’s his excellent eye for the everyday absurdity emergent from small talk, advertisements and other detritus of daily life that provides some of the biggest laughs and best insights.
This novel is no exception, though it seems a little bit underrated among his works, tucked as it between the peaks of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5, and lacking the tight clockwork cohesion of those works. But it’s a great novel in its own right. A quick synopsis: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is told largely through a series of vignettes and sketches detailing the exploits of Eliot Rosewater, heir to a colossal family fortune that has been secured under a Foundation, so as to legally weasel out of inheritance tax. Unfortunately for his father, a notorious Conservative senator, Eliot is insane, an alcoholic, and has dedicated his life to aiding the poor. This fact is seized upon by young lawyer Norman Mushari, who works for the law firm that represents the Rosewaters. He smells an opportunity to get his own hands on some of this money by representing the next-in-line to the fortune in a bid to overthrow Eliot as President of the Foundation. We then get a snapshot of the life and surroundings of the distant Rosewater cousin in question, a lower-middle-class life insurance salesman in the wealthy town of Pisquontuit, before the novel builds to an unexpected resolution of Eliot’s mission. The trademark Vonnegut digressions and shenanigans ensue (including allusions to a couple of Kilgore Trout novels, naturally). All of this is the scaffolding for a series of probings into wealth inequality, the American class system, the pitfalls of philanthropy, and the nature of luck.
In some ways it’s difficult to adequately convey just how effective Vonnegut’s prose stylings are in a review—it’s all in the pacing, the faux-offhand stacking of simple sentences and juxtapositions. This lends itself just as well to poignancy as to humour. I’d end up inflating this essay with page-long quotations, were I to try and dissect how much humour he can coax from an innocuous sentence such as “My mother was a Moon. My Father was a Glampers”, or “Frustration made Norman Mushari sneeze”.
As for the characters? Most are absurd, are not especially deep people, or are downright caricatures, yet this is never to the novel’s detriment. Norman Mushari is a classic Vonnegut caricature—a venal, unscrupulous young lawyer. How does he make this work (as with all of his best caricatures)? Chiefly by being really funny, but also just specific enough in the details he gives us of Mushari while not having a one-note character outstay his welcome (and after all, there’s people out here in reality who behave like caricatures of themselves too). We learn in an aside that Mushari, at 12, liked to spend his time “assembling plastic model airplanes, masturbating, and papering his room with pictures of Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn”. Enough said.
But amid the absurdity, there are moments of real emotion between the novel’s cast. As in many of his books, here Vonnegut’s cynicism is tempered with a kind of sympathetic understanding, a specificity of detail, that oddly elevates his most pathetic portraits. Take Senator Rosewater, the long-suffering father of the titular character, and Conservative politician. His beliefs are fodder for comedy, and yet there’s a genuine pathos in this turbulent father-son relationship and his desperate attempts to convince himself that Eliot isn’t a lost cause. Such a character can both provoke a funny running gag about the obscenity law he passed (the man’s not a fan of bush), and a twinge of sympathy for his alienation from his son. At one point, when Eliot tells his father that he loves him, it stirs this despairing response: “You’re the man who stands on a street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, ‘I love you.’ And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don’t want my square of toilet paper.” The image is funny in a deliberately bathetic kind of way, but it’s made clear why Eliot’s personal relationships are a shambles, even as he seems content in the paternalistic persona he assumes towards the people he aids.
And that brings me to the novel’s protagonist himself. After rambling manically across small-town America, he settles in the shithole town of Rosewater, Indiana (named for his ancestor). Using it as the base for his attempt at Utopia, he is viewed as a kind of saint by the underclass townspeople. Yet despite his fortune, his most common prescription to the ailing who visit him in his squalid office is an aspirin washed down with wine. He bathes all who visit him in unconditional love and attention, in whatever way the situation calls for (it generally doesn’t involve too much money). What he is trying to heal is not poverty, so much as the general malaise that arises from an anomic life.
His insanity is shared with a number of Vonnegut’s protagonists. The irony here is that while Eliot Rosewater is not a well man, it’s not for the reasons fixated on by his father and lawyers. His compassion for the poor and downtrodden, and tendency to diatribe about the evil and cupidity of a world in which he can be earning nearly 10 grand a day solely from interest is of great concern to them. Meanwhile, his accidental killing of a civilian firefighter during World War 2 is hand-waved (in a passage, midway through the novel which greatly gains from its matter-of-fact nature). Add to this the fact that he also was accidentally involved in his mother’s death, and it’s to be expected that this man might have problems. There’s some wicked satire of the field of psychology and what it deems “normal” here, through Eliot and his ex-wife Sylvia’s various encounters with psychoanalysts.
On the other hand, while Eliot has moments of downright commonsense in his rants about the failings of the US towards its working class, and the narrative clearly sympathises with him to a point, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater skewers naive bleeding-heartism as much as the callous bootstrapping set—and is pretty dead-on in its satire. Eliot’s need to glorify the working class as a precondition of helping them is poked fun at (and consider how common such attitudes are among the well-meaning privileged!) He believes his clients are “the rickety sons and grandsons of the pioneers”, the backbone of the country. In fact, we are informed that “the people who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that—and dumber too. When it came time for their sons to go into the Armed Forces…the sons were generally rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable.” But does this make them less worthy of such help? This novel is clearly expressing a “no” to that, but its argument is a bit more daring than you get in a lot of art with left-wing sympathies.
And outside of Eliot’s romanticism, the section of the novel centring around his long-lost cousin in the town of Pisquontuit is bleak, with a decidedly black kind of humour. Uselessness is not merely the domain of the underclass, as we see the wealthy heirs and heiresses of Pisquontuit languishing in it too. It’s a pointed comment that the only person in this novel who is remotely fulfilled and happy is a gainfully employed trap fisherman in the town (who turns out to be on the verge of bankruptcy). This part comes to a great, darkly funny climax in which the pathetic, anomic Fred Rosewater finally looks within a copy of a family history his suicidal father wrote, at last mustering up a sense of pride and identity in reference to his ancestors—only to turn the page and find the manuscript eaten away by termites. All he’s left with is the slimy salvation offered by Norman Mushari’s sudden “offer” to help him get his rightful fortune (a gambit from which only Mushari will end up benefiting).
For all this bleakness, it’s notable that Kurt Vonnegut manages to end the tale on a note that’s funny and even triumphant. Eliot, recovering from a nervous breakdown, hatches a plan to resolve his sanity hearing via claiming dozens of illegitimate children among Rosewater’s citizens, who will therefore inherit control of the Foundation’s money after him. There is a vignette earlier in the novel in which a wealthy young heir is admonished cynically by his legal advisor for wanting to give away his wealth to the poor. Yet much of what he says has a truth to it, as such good intentions can do nothing to change the context they exist in (“the donor and his descendants become undistinguished members of the whining poor”, chides the lawyer). So, this novel’s conclusion aptly conveys the notion that only an “insane” idea could be enough to subvert the sickness inherent in this system by turning its tactics inside out.
Kurt Vonnegut is noted by many for the cynicism on display throughout his corpus, and yet there is a kind of undeniably humanist current underlying this artistic display of humanity at its most crazy, pathetic, shallow, and dumb. After all, it exists. The world is full of it! To be able to look unflinchingly at the debris of the world and resist raising a shield of idealisation—there’s a kind of honour in documenting our most banally ugly parts, and framing them through humour and art. True acceptance is a better kind of love. If, in his cameo at the novel’s end, Kilgore Trout was on to something in pointing out social uselessness as “a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines”, then God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater will remain damn relevant for the next while. The good news is, we’ll be able to laugh through it.
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More from Laura Woods: Refractions of Reflections: on Judith Wright’s “Naked Girl and Mirror”, Art As Issue: On Peter Mullen’s “The Magdalene Sisters” (2002), Myth in Motion: Review of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927)