The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders Page A

you couldn’t quite reach. The hope was that someday, when enough failure had been logged, a miracle would happen, and one would briefly be launched above one’s station, suddenly able to write in that impossible, inscrutable, nineteenth-century language of the masters, and this miracle would happen often enough that one could eventually cobble together the two hundred or so pages it took to make a Real Book.
    Then, on one of my Singapore jaunts, I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I knew, vaguely, that this was a classic. I knew it had to do with World War II, that the author had been present at the fire-bombing of Dresden. This sounded promising. At this time I also believed, courtesy of my hero Ernest Hemingway, that great writing required a Terrible Event One Had Witnessed. With any luck, one had been wounded during the Terrible Event, although not too badly. If not a physical wound, a mental wound was fine. The Terrible Event was what I was in Asia seeking. I had been to the Cambodian border seeking it, been to the Khyber Pass seeking it, but everywhere I went, was too cautious to be blown up or see anything horrific. Given the chance to get into real danger, I would think: Jeez, that sounds dangerous, retreat to my reasonably priced hotel, and read Hemingway.
    But here was Vonnegut, a guy who had witnessed one of the most Terrible Events of his time. I was excited to see what he’d done with it. I hoped he hadn’t wasted it. I hoped he’d done something like Hem had done with it. I hoped he had come out of it sobered and sullen, broken by his Terrible Event, but also that he had taken notes, so his book would be filled with pages of terse literary descriptions that showed that, though wounded, he still appreciated a good sunbeam slanting across a crude wooden table or a nice wind-ruffled stand of oak trees through which a river flowed pleasantly.
    But then I started reading. In chapter one, right off the bat, Vonnegut admits to trying and failing, over many years, to write the very book I was looking forward to reading: “As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations,” he writes, “I had outlined the Dresden story many times.” But then he admits: “I don’t think this book…is ever going to be finished. I must have written five thousand pages by now, and thrown them all away.” In chapter one he seems determined not to tell his war story at all. He writes, conversationally, about his days as a reporter, relates an anecdote about a visit with an old war buddy; scrolls through histories of the Crusades and of Dresden; quotes Roethke, Erika Ostrovsky, and the Gideon Bible; describes the carp in the Hudson River (“big as atomic submarines”). Then he offers this advance apology for the book we’re reading: “It is so short and jangled…because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” It’s an introductory chapter, one the reader suspects was written last, when the rest of the book was already finished, but still, the effect is of a haunted man, delaying for as long as possible telling the big, sad story he’s been trying to get off his chest for years, realizing that if he insists on telling it in a grand style, it may get told falsely, or never be told at all.
    In chapter two the story finally began. But immediately there were more avoidances of the lyric/epic masterpiece I longed to be reading. Because suddenly, here came some space aliens, from Trafalmadore, “two feet high, and green, and shaped like plumber’s friends.” What the heck? I was thinking, back in Sumatra, in 1982, this is a classic? Aliens did not belong in classics. Aliens belonged in movies. Aliens were great; I loved aliens in movies, but I did not want them in my Literature. What I wanted in my Literature was a somber, wounded, masterly presence, regarding the world with a jaundiced, totally humorless eye.
    But no, Vonnegut was