Kurt Vonnegut ─ Novels 1987-1997: Bluebeard / Hocus Pocus / Timequake

The definitive edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction concludes with three satirical novels of the 1980s and ’90s—breathtakingly inventive parables of art and politics in the twilight years of the American century.As Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and a dozen other brilliant and wildly popular novels, entered the final decades of his creative life he continued to produce works that combine elements of stand-up comedy, Swiftian satire, pulp-magazine space fantasy, and a small-town Midwesterner’s sense of common decency. The three novels in this final Library of America volume of his works are also suffused with something new: an aching nostalgia for a remembered America that is on the verge of disappearing forever.
Bluebeard (1987) is a tale of the artistic life as told by Rabo Karabakian, a phenomenally accomplished Armenian-American draftsman who, as a young man in the 1950s, sold out his talent to become what critics and collectors then demanded—a minimalist painter of the Barnett Newman type. Now, alone in his potato barn at the age of seventy-one, he writes his tell-all memoirs, plots his revenge on the cultural forces that have corrupted him, and, one painstaking brushstroke at a time, pursues his own salvation.Hocus Pocus (1990), one of Vonnegut’s most impressive performances, is a panoramic farrago of the hot-button issues of the 1980s—political correctness, corporate greed, pollution, globalization, and militarization—all brought to a giddy and dangerous boil. Its narrator is Eugene Debs Hartke, a former professor at Tarkington College, now president of its successor institution, Tarkington State Reformatory, who, recounting the Western Apocalypse from the perspective of the early 21st century, concludes: “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe.”Timequake (1997), Vonnegut’s last completed novel, is part science-fiction yarn starring his perennial protagonist Kilgore Trout, part autobiographical narrative starring the author himself. The result is a perfect fusion of Vonnegut’s two major genres, the satirical fantasy and the personal memoir, a literary magician’s fond farewell.

Sidney Offit, editor of The Library of America's four-volume Kurt Vonnegut edition, has written novels, books for young readers, and memoirs including, most recently,Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen. He was senior editor of Intellectual Digest, book editor ofPolitics Today, and contributing editor of Baseball Magazine. He wrote the foreword toLook at the Birdie, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished short fiction.