The Hand of Time

Such as?

"A pretty girl. A street musician. A friend who gets off a perfectly wonderful joke I'd never heard before."

Or just today, perhaps, the chance to play that "Slaughterhouse-Five" reading, which he'd recorded a cappella but which was set to music by an Australian fan.

"We went platinum in Melbourne!"

More laughter. He's joking, of course.

Vonnegut has said repeatedly that he has written his last book. This has not yet proved true, though he hasn't published a novel in almost a decade, and with each passing year the odds get better that we've seen the last from this inventive, outspoken, unclassifiable American original.

He has also said he did his best work before he was 55, and "my life is essentially a garage sale now of stuff I wrote a long time ago." This is an accurate assessment.

"A Man Without a Country" was woven together by Seven Stories Press editor Dan Simon (to whom Vonnegut assigns the lion's share of credit). It is a pastiche of speeches the author has given over the years and short articles he's written for the left-leaning weekly In These Times. The book has landed, somewhat improbably, on various nonfiction bestseller lists. But it's hard to imagine what a reader would make of it, coming to it cold.

Far better to begin with that "stuff" from long ago.

Paperback Original

Vonnegut was born in Indiana in 1922. "I think about where home is: It's Indianapolis when I was 9 years old," he says. And why not? He had "a mother and a father, a big sister, a big brother, a dog, a cat." If time travel were truly an option, he'd take himself back right now.

At Shortridge High, he wrote for the school's daily paper; he loved the instant feedback. His father, an architect who'd been hurt badly by the Depression, said he wouldn't pay for Kurt to go to college unless he studied chemistry, "for which I had no gift whatsoever." He enrolled at Cornell in 1940.

In March 1943, he enlisted in the Army.