Review: Mother Night

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m now halfway into my third period as a Vonnegut reader. The first was when I was in high school and the beginning of college. He was, then, the first “serious” contemporary writer I discovered, the first novelist who gave me some of the tools to make sense of the adult political world I was discovering, in large measure, through the critique he offered of it.

The second was, for most of my life as a serious reader and thinker about literature – a period when I got advanced degrees in American literature and taught full-time at the college level – when I generally dismissed Vonnegut as a writer of his moment, as someone who was “fun” when I came across him but who no longer had a great deal to tell us.

The third started seven or eight years ago, I suppose, when I re-read Cat’s Cradle and realized it remained, to paraphrase Ezra Pound’s quote that “poetry is news that stays news,” still novel. Since then, I have been slowly reworking my way through the Vonnegut canon. They haven’t all held up – Breakfast of Champions, for instance, strikes me as gimmicky and unrealized even though it has moments of being fun – but most have. I am, for instance, trying to weigh whether I can live with standing behind the claim that “Slaughterhouse Five is one of the important American novels of the 20th century.”

The sum of all this is that I am contemplating some big project on Vonnegut, an academic article or even a book about him and the distinct way he addressed the narrative of trauma. My thesis is that, unlike Hemingway who taught us that trauma expresses itself in the difficulty of forming the coherent sentence, Vonnegut gives us easy sentences that push against the possibility (a possibility he sometimes casts as immoral) of creating the coherent narrative. Another possibility is a senior seminar or adult ed class where we look at Vonnegut’s canon.

All of that is too-long prologue for my sense that Mother Night – which does hold up better than I thought it might – seems to me an important Vonnegut novel. It may clock in behind Slaughterhouse Five and Cat’s Cradle, but I think it’s right there with God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in the next tier.

As I see it at the moment, Slaughterhouse Five is the culmination of Vonnegut’s career; it’s the novel he knew he had to write in order to express the central trauma of his life. Mother Night is, instead, an inspired idea for a novel, one that reflects on the news of its moment and that Vonnegut used as a means to develop the voice he’d use more personally in his later works.

The crucial news of the moment, which Vonnegut references in the novel, was the arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was a man who, looking as Hannah Arendt would describe him, “banal,” stood behind the most horrifying evil of the century, perhaps even in all of human history. Arendt’s signature work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, actually came out after Mother Night, but each was grappling with the same question: how could our everyday life, our banality, persist while the memory of such crime lingered or, worse, while we allowed such memories to fade.

Arendt wrote as an observer, as someone frustrated with her inability to see Eichmann as a sign of such evil. In a way that strikes me as deeply brave, Vonnegut inserted his own consciousness. As a novelist, he assumed some of Eichmann’s guilt – he gives us a first-person protagonist who’s served as a heinous Nazi propagandist – but he complicated it.

Howard Campbell, Jr. is not purely evil. In fact, though he spoke as he did throughout the war, he did so as a secret agent, managing to transmit crucial information to the Allies. He is a hero of the most complicated sort, one whom politics and history can never acknowledge. And, as the compelling conclusion puts it, his heroism is still not enough to save him from himself.

So, where Arendt makes an abstract philosophical claim about the nature of evil, Vonnegut places the question on the individual. He asks, Is real but secret resistance to the evil sufficient motive to be seen, forever, as complicit with it. And he asks even further, Can any of us be innocent if we have lived in a world that permitted such evil. Those are powerful questions, ones that resonated with me as an adolescent but that likely would have mattered to me less in my young adulthood.

And, while there are some Vonnegut mannerisms that sometimes distract from that central seriousness, there is something timeless about this novel. I hadn’t read it in more than 30 years, but I found crucial plot points – [SPOILER:] that Resi is posing as Helga, that Bernard B. O’Hare has a false sense of self-importance, that the Blue Fairy Godmother reveals himself – not just familiar but seemingly necessary. That is, it took me that long to realize it, but Vonnegut achieves the level of “true fable” with this. He creates an imaginary experience that seems entirely true to its internal premises.

As a bottom line, I am still working through how exuberantly I am willing to praise Vonnegut. If he is as great as I think he might actually be – if he really is one of the crucial writers of the second half of the 20th Century – then this is a novel we ought to be reading for a long time to come.


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