December 13, 2009
slapstick: lonesome no more! an amazingly potent book written in 1976 satirizing loneliness on both a individual and social scale. Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. (Super-intelligent, miniaturized Chinese watch the West self-destruct from the sidelines.) Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern, then moved to deserted New York City, where he writes a thoughtful missive before death. In Slapstick, Vonnegut muses on war, man’s hubris, and the awful, crippling loneliness humans are freighted with—but, miraculously, the book still manages to delight and amuse. Absurd, knowing, never depressing, Slapstick kindles hope—for the possibility of wisdom, perhaps; for human resiliency, surely.

slapstick: lonesome no more!

an amazingly potent book written in 1976 satirizing loneliness on both a individual and social scale.

Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, centenarian, the last President of the United States, King of Manhattan, and one-half (along with his sister, Eliza) of the most powerful intelligence since Einstein, is penning his autobiography. He occupies the first floor of a ruined Empire State Building and lives like a royal scavenger with his illiterate granddaughter and her beau. Buffeted by fluctuating gravity, the U.S. has been scourged by not one, but two lethal diseases: the Green Death and the Albanian Flu. Consequently, the country has fallen into civil war. (Super-intelligent, miniaturized Chinese watch the West self-destruct from the sidelines.) Swain stayed at the White House until there were no citizens left to govern, then moved to deserted New York City, where he writes a thoughtful missive before death.

In Slapstick, Vonnegut muses on war, man’s hubris, and the awful, crippling loneliness humans are freighted with—but, miraculously, the book still manages to delight and amuse. Absurd, knowing, never depressing, Slapstick kindles hope—for the possibility of wisdom, perhaps; for human resiliency, surely.

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