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I've moved on to Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, but I still stop to think about Cat's Cradle now and again. I just didn't say all that much about it last time, so I guess I'll elaborate on it a little bit here.
There are some spoilers, but everything I'm saying is basically the premise of the novel, so I don't think that they're too bad.
I think what frustrated me the most about it was that it really wasn't bad, but the finish was weak where the beginning was strong. It started with what appeared to be a series of vignettes, in a chronological order, from a disaffected journalist. The journalist is writing a book about a scientist, and then the end of the world happens, and that's the end. Bokononism is the deliberately fake religion chosen for the purposes of the story, and the story itself seems to be largely a meditation on religion, deliberate religious constructs, the nature of truth, the ethics of science, and the nature of fate. As themes, they're classics. Stated in the middle of the Cold War, they're probably very potent. Vonnegut's writing is cynical, wry, but not without humor, and what he has to say is interesting.
Since the story is short, and all of the above is true, I recommend reading Cat's Cradle on those premises alone. I guess I would probably call the book 'good', if that's useful to you, but it left me dissatisfied as a reader and I spent a little while trying to determine why. I felt like it was probably too long, that there were probably too many characters we simply didn't need (or that I didn't want), that the protagonist wasn't very interesting (or sympathetic, which is actually not that great an issue for me), and that the book read as almost intolerably smug, though that might simply be projection.
The protagonist is a novelist, and goes here and there looking for interviews for his upcoming work. I feel like, as he gets deeper into his research and discovers more interesting and odd individuals and phenomenon, then perhaps that could drive him. Whim and total coverage were enough for Hunter S. Thompson, after all, but despite the odd occurrences, he seems bored and a little put out. He possesses a deep and abiding lack of curiosity, and attributes his direction to the most paper thin other reasons. There's nothing explicitly wrong with this. It just felt a little weak. I could (and did) abide it as I continued towards the conclusion of the novel. Near towards the end, events look like they'll unfold one way - an interesting way, really - and suddenly go in a totally different direction. The protagonist has no agency in the development of the plot. I understand why, narratively, that Vonnegut did this, and I understand that this can (and does) happen in real life. But in a novel, I find it to be incredibly dull and, while there may be a point to it, when you're actually reading it, it feels extremely lazy. It is almost literally a Deus ex Machina ending.
In order to facilitate direction, Vonnegut fills his novel with a colorful cast of characters that do nothing, don't really say anything, and exist purely as window dressing. The revelations they enable are red herrings. Nothing in the first few hundred pages matters at all. Literally nothing. The book could easily be cut to 20 pages and half the cast banished to the oblivion of never-been-imagined, and the story would lose no punch. The story reads like Vonnegut has something in mind and gets rushed at the very end, finishing the story in a different way almost out of spite. I honestly can't tell if this is intentional or if it's just weak writing. If I can't tell, I don't care. If you've wasted my time for art, my time is still wasted. Thanks, Vonnegut.
It's smug. It reads like the guy who just declared he's an atheist, and filled with disdain for those who still cling to what he considers to be an outmoded system of belief, writes a tract that flirts with nihilism, but is too scared to follow through. It's a proud, but sad and fragile work from an excellent writer who, when I observe carefully, feels like he copped out right there at the very end, too scared to commit fully to the page. This isn't saying anything about Vonnegut himself, of course, since I don't know (and it doesn't matter). Perhaps I'll read it again sometime, but probably not. Whatever secrets I've missed in this novel aren't sufficiently compelling for me to indulge its bleak pages more than once.
Now, Murakami is personally one of my favorite writers. His own protagonists are known by some reviewers I've read for being especially languid and without momentum of their own, and in the past I've disputed that. (I feel like the direction they're trying to go is simply not the direction that events eventually lead them in, but that's a discussion for another time.) I'll be reading Kafka on the Shore for the second time, though, and I'll be more critical this time than the first, so I'm interested to see what my new take is on the work. I've also been thumbing through the soft-cover version of Wraith lately, which I think I've mentioned, but I haven't gotten further than about page 30. I do have some things to say about it, though, so if you're interested in my analysis of older White Wolf products, you may have come to the right place.
There are some spoilers, but everything I'm saying is basically the premise of the novel, so I don't think that they're too bad.
I think what frustrated me the most about it was that it really wasn't bad, but the finish was weak where the beginning was strong. It started with what appeared to be a series of vignettes, in a chronological order, from a disaffected journalist. The journalist is writing a book about a scientist, and then the end of the world happens, and that's the end. Bokononism is the deliberately fake religion chosen for the purposes of the story, and the story itself seems to be largely a meditation on religion, deliberate religious constructs, the nature of truth, the ethics of science, and the nature of fate. As themes, they're classics. Stated in the middle of the Cold War, they're probably very potent. Vonnegut's writing is cynical, wry, but not without humor, and what he has to say is interesting.
Since the story is short, and all of the above is true, I recommend reading Cat's Cradle on those premises alone. I guess I would probably call the book 'good', if that's useful to you, but it left me dissatisfied as a reader and I spent a little while trying to determine why. I felt like it was probably too long, that there were probably too many characters we simply didn't need (or that I didn't want), that the protagonist wasn't very interesting (or sympathetic, which is actually not that great an issue for me), and that the book read as almost intolerably smug, though that might simply be projection.
The protagonist is a novelist, and goes here and there looking for interviews for his upcoming work. I feel like, as he gets deeper into his research and discovers more interesting and odd individuals and phenomenon, then perhaps that could drive him. Whim and total coverage were enough for Hunter S. Thompson, after all, but despite the odd occurrences, he seems bored and a little put out. He possesses a deep and abiding lack of curiosity, and attributes his direction to the most paper thin other reasons. There's nothing explicitly wrong with this. It just felt a little weak. I could (and did) abide it as I continued towards the conclusion of the novel. Near towards the end, events look like they'll unfold one way - an interesting way, really - and suddenly go in a totally different direction. The protagonist has no agency in the development of the plot. I understand why, narratively, that Vonnegut did this, and I understand that this can (and does) happen in real life. But in a novel, I find it to be incredibly dull and, while there may be a point to it, when you're actually reading it, it feels extremely lazy. It is almost literally a Deus ex Machina ending.
In order to facilitate direction, Vonnegut fills his novel with a colorful cast of characters that do nothing, don't really say anything, and exist purely as window dressing. The revelations they enable are red herrings. Nothing in the first few hundred pages matters at all. Literally nothing. The book could easily be cut to 20 pages and half the cast banished to the oblivion of never-been-imagined, and the story would lose no punch. The story reads like Vonnegut has something in mind and gets rushed at the very end, finishing the story in a different way almost out of spite. I honestly can't tell if this is intentional or if it's just weak writing. If I can't tell, I don't care. If you've wasted my time for art, my time is still wasted. Thanks, Vonnegut.
It's smug. It reads like the guy who just declared he's an atheist, and filled with disdain for those who still cling to what he considers to be an outmoded system of belief, writes a tract that flirts with nihilism, but is too scared to follow through. It's a proud, but sad and fragile work from an excellent writer who, when I observe carefully, feels like he copped out right there at the very end, too scared to commit fully to the page. This isn't saying anything about Vonnegut himself, of course, since I don't know (and it doesn't matter). Perhaps I'll read it again sometime, but probably not. Whatever secrets I've missed in this novel aren't sufficiently compelling for me to indulge its bleak pages more than once.
Now, Murakami is personally one of my favorite writers. His own protagonists are known by some reviewers I've read for being especially languid and without momentum of their own, and in the past I've disputed that. (I feel like the direction they're trying to go is simply not the direction that events eventually lead them in, but that's a discussion for another time.) I'll be reading Kafka on the Shore for the second time, though, and I'll be more critical this time than the first, so I'm interested to see what my new take is on the work. I've also been thumbing through the soft-cover version of Wraith lately, which I think I've mentioned, but I haven't gotten further than about page 30. I do have some things to say about it, though, so if you're interested in my analysis of older White Wolf products, you may have come to the right place.
