Review: We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First and Last Works

We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First and Last Works by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m a big enough Kurt Vonnegut admirer that I’m willing to read most of what he wrote. I confess that I have only limited patience for his later work, though, and this one does not change my opinion.

The second of the two novellas included here, If God Were Alive Today, has a good title and…that’s more or less it. It’s purportedly the last thing he ever wrote, and it tells me we got all the good stuff years before.

The premise is that our protagonist, Gil Berman, is a stand-up comedian who – as he nears a more or less sudden death – finds a kind of honesty in his performances. David Grossman took that same premise and created a contemporary masterpiece in Horse Walks Into a Bar. Here, though, Vonnegut fails in the first obligation for writing about a stand-up comedian: be funny. (Think how disappointing the genuinely marvelous Marvelous Mrs. Maisel would be if, after all its other excellences, the standup routines weren’t also so well written.)

Berman is not just unfunny, but he’s out of touch, and it’s painful to see Vonnegut as off his game as he is. Berman reflects – awkwardly and, ultimately, cowardly – on elements of political correctness bashing, and he seems out of touch with his culture. By extension, Vonnegut seems so as well.

There’s a thin narrative that develops, but it’s mostly a mood piece, and a weak one at that. There’s a clear reason he never published it in his lifetime, and it isn’t a favor to have had it published now.

The other novella here, Basic Training, is arguably the first thing he ever wrote. There’s evidence he tried to get it published when he was younger, but he failed and should probably be grateful that he did.

This piece has the virtue of some nice pastoral elements to it. Haley Brandon is a young man who, having lost his parents in an accident, winds up at his uncle’s farm where he falls in love with a cousin and has an adventure or two involving an “off” farm hand. The uncle is known affectionately as “the General” because he is a World War I veteran and a committed disciplinarian on the farm.

It’s striking here to see how much nostalgia Vonnegut gives to his portrait of the old General. My own interest in Vonnegut has to do with the way he gradually addresses the trauma of his time in World War II. It takes him five published novels – up to Slaughterhouse Five – before he can really address it. Still, in the published work we see his contempt for all things military and ordered. Here, though, the General – while inflexible and judgmental – is ultimately a sweet guy.

Most surprisingly, there’s a final, almost-violent climax where Haley rescues the General from the murderous farm hand, and it ends happily. In other words, this is Vonnegut, and someone comes out enriched and unironically virtuous for showing bravery in a tight spot.

The story itself is fairly weak, but it’s interesting to see Vonnegut playing with form. For that, it has historical interest.

There’s also a troubling introduction here by Vonnegut’s daughter who at one point seems quite angry with her step-mother. My sense is that Nanette Vonnegut, while otherwise disconnected from the literary executorship, had some claim to these manuscripts because they were in her possession. The result seems to be that she had to the opportunity to sell them (to Da Capo Press) on her own rather than as part of Vonnegut’s larger work.

If you love Vonnegut, there’s really nothing to see here. If you’re curious, read “Basic Training” and then give yourself just one chapter of If God Were Alive Today.


View all my reviews