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Originally Posted by ilduclo
well, we're certainly on the downhill slope now. Vonnegut always struck me as high school intellectualism.
Robbe-Grillet created a couple of the most ominous and unsettling stories ever in the Voyeur and Jealousy.
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I have to say, I've always felt similarly about Vonnegut. Even when I was in high school, it felt like "high school intellectualism." One of the defining moments in my literary development was when I literally threw "Cat's Cradle" across the room after slogging through its last insufferable page during my junior year.
It's funny that I don't lio Vonnegut, though, because I have a great deal of respect for some of his contemporaries and folllwers. I love Walter M. Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," which has some Vonnegut-esque elements and is generally lumped in with the satirical and ironic science fiction that was so popular in the '60s and '70s.
I also love John Irving, a clear and unashamed Vonnegut acolyte.
A Prayer for Owen Meany would rank pretty high on my all-time novels list, if such a thing were to exist. And I've also been known to dig a bit of Tom Robbins from time to time, and I challenge you to find a writer more derivative of KVJ.
But... with Vonnegut, I just can't do it. Something's missing for me. My favorite thing if his that I've read is "Long Walk to Forever" from "Welcome to the Monkeyhouse," and it might be the least Vonnegut-esque thing he wrote.
It might be that I'm a bit of an SF-head. I like my SF deep and thoughtful, with limited whimsy and preferably no satire. I think it's an underrated genre that at its best (Gene Wolfe, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood) can really challenge the way we view the world and the future, as well as our own history of horror and violence.
Vonnegut pops up on a lot of SF readers' best-ever lists, and I get pissed off, because he takes the genre and idea of speculative fiction from he perspective of a snarky kid in the corner. I like Ray Bradbury, and I like Mark Twain. I don't need to read the crap that might be produced if they had a three-way with Loki, god of trickery and made-you-look.
/curmudgeon