I feel dumber with each review I write. I loved Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It has one of my favorite literary passages of all time:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it you’ve got to be kind.”
But my brain won’t analyze it. It just loves it. It loves the concept of a wealthy man who cares about the impoverished and suffering and personally answers the phone at his family’s charitable foundation. He gives people money, he listens to them with an open, kind heart. His father is an unsympathetic rich politician who is the polar opposite of his son. There are many side characters. It’s humorous and weird. It’s about an America that is still itself more than ever: unearned power for the wealthy, deprivation for those below them. It’s a critique and a satire and an earnest treatise all at once.
I think the problem is I read so fast and greedily that I emerge from a book’s world addled with fuzzy memories of what it was actually about. I am just left with a feeling, an overall response that is hard to break down into pieces.
Well, no matter. I love how quirky the characters are in this book and how much heart there is in it. There is cynicism too, but it’s answered by the purity of the main character, Eliot Rosewater. This book has great humanity. Vonnegut feels like a quintessentially American writer, and his critiques are dead on. His writing reminds me of James Baldwin’s statement: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”