“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. […]