Review: Player Piano

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve thought about Vonnegut a lot over the last 3-5 years, and I’ve re-read most of what I’d once read multiple times in high school and home from college. His work was my intellectual comfort food and then, all at once, I’d decided I was beyond him.

The big insight that launched my re-interest came when I realized the extent to which we can trace his coming to terms with the trauma of his war-time experiences, culminating in Slaughterhouse-Five. I found real power in the early novels as we watch him inching ever closer to confronting what it meant to witness what the Allies did to the Germans at Dresden, a story more ironic and horrible than anything he could ever invent himself.

For me, Vonnegut gets really good with Mother Night, his third novel, though we can see some interesting things happening in Sirens of Titan, his second. This one is his first, and, coming back to it, I see some glimmers. But, by comparison with what was coming just a couple years later, this is close to a failure.

Among other things, this is badly plotted. Our hero, Paul Proteus, does have a fascinating experience. Unable, in Vonnegut fashion, to share faith with either of the sides in conflict – he’s born and trained to belong to the engineering elite, but he’s temperamentally unable to join them or the active resistance – he eventually gets fired in order to be sent as an undercover agent of the rebels. Everyone assumes he’s someone he is not. (It’s clumsy here, but Vonnegut does it elegantly in Mother Night.)

That section should be the heart of this novel. Instead, it comes something like two-thirds of the way through with the earlier parts all an extended comic sci-fi/dystopia. It’s apprentice work for the excellence that would follow, but at first it’s spread out too slowly and then it’s rushed. In retrospect, I think a good editor could have saved it, but first he or she would have had to know the voice and style Vonnegut would later develop.

This does interest me, though, for the glimpses we see of what I’ll call the proto-revelations of trauma. This is still loosely in the “Harrison Bergeron” phase where, in a kind of libertarianism, Vonnegut seemed to fear the power of unbridled government more than, as he eventually settled into, the unbridled power of late capitalism. In this moment, we see a poignant yearning for some of what the war made possible. Multiple characters, no more ironic than others, seem nostalgic for the shared purpose of battle.

We do get an early sense of the pointlessness of war. One character recounts winning a major medal because, moments after a Nazi attack, he got a generator working again and electrocuted a thousand Germans who’d managed to make their way to an electric fence that was temporarily disabled. That is, we get an acknowledgement that war is pointless and anti-human, but that doesn’t entirely overwhelm the sense that the narrative of war has a power to bring humans together.

There’s a send-up of corporate life that involves inventing a series of pointless Blue/Green/White teams with strong patriotic self-definitions – that is, there’s a sense of the phoniness of what Vonnegut will call Granfalloons in Cat’s Cradle – but he doesn’t seem all the way able to dismiss the “foma” of patriotism.

In other words, I see a residue of his claiming that what he endured had some purpose to it. That residue is eroding – I think it may be mostly gone by Sirens of Titan – but this marks a fascinating glimpse at the man Vonnegut was before he made himself into the Vonnegut we know.

Don’t bother with this one unless you’ve done the other early ones first, but it’s valuable because of what it shows of an artist slowly forcing himself to become himself.


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