Title: The First Vonnegut Book I Didn't Finish
Product review: Vonnegut seems to have lost the ability to juggle multiple narratives the way he once did so masterfully (see "The Sirens of Titan"). The result is a mishmash.He mourns the death of the short story as a literary form and gives that as his justification for the device of inserting his ideas for short stories into his novels. I've always enjoyed that device.But this is what happens when you take a short story (or more accurately, the bits and pieces of a short story) and mix it in a salad bowl with other ideas for a short story, along with some family reminiscences and your general cranky views of life. It starts nowhere, goes nowhere, and although I gave up on it about 3/4 of the way through, I'll bet my next paycheck that it arrives nowhere.If you decide to read this mess anyway, ask yourself what would have happened to the manuscript if it had originally arrived on a publisher's desk with your name on it instead of Vonnegut's.
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