Kurt Vonnegut was a writer fascinated, or haunted, by jail. Many of the main characters of his novels are imprisoned in some way: Slaughterhouse-Five’s Billy Pilgrim a prisoner of war in World War II, the lead in Player Piano arrested, the lead in Sirens of Titan forced into the service of a Martian army, Mother Night a memoir written in prison.
Jailbird, published in 1979, was Vonnegut’s ninth novel and its story opens with its leading character about to be released from jail. He’ll eventually return to where he begins. Like Mother Night, this is a first-person story told in retrospect by a prisoner, and just as in that book the reader can work out for themselves whether prison’s a just fate or whether it’s merely one of the absurdities all flesh is heir to.
The narrator and main character is Walter F. Starbuck, least significant of Watergate conspirators, who agreed to hide a steamer trunk full of cash and then refused to rat out the men who did it. A former namer of names during the McCarthy paranoia, he learned the wrong lesson from his social shunning after testifying in the 1950s; thinking he did wrong ratting on others rather than collaborating with a witch hunt, he refused to testify about Watergate and was sent to jail.
He’s released with the 1970s winding down, and we follow him as, without friends or prospects, he tries to make his way in the world. He goes to New York, he revisits old haunts, we learn about his background and the nature of upper-class America of the past, he lucks into a fortune and finally loses it all again.
Again, this resembles Mother Night: a man who’s outlived a loving wife tries to let himself be forgotten by the world while living in the seamy side of New York City. But Starbuck doesn’t deny that he did what landed him in jail. He provides context, for that and many other actions in his life, meaning the book implies themes of guilt and responsibility and redemption without being didactic.
There’s an intricate mix between fictional characters and the reality of American history, notably labor history. As with many of Vonnegut’s books, Jailbird opens with a long prologue reflecting on Vonnegut’s connection to the themes and events of the story, in this case ending with a recounting of a fictional labor clash in 1894. That clash sets the scene for much of Starbuck’s life and introduces the source of his wealth: he was the recipient of largesse from the last member of the robber baron family responsible for the violence, to please whom his family changed their surname from Stankiewicz to the Anglo-Saxon Starbuck.
The book’s interested in exploitation, and how people were exploited in 20th-century America. It’s a story about how Starbuck’s values changed over the course of his life, and how American values changed over those same years.
We see what sex meant for Starbuck as a young college man in the 1930s, and what sex has come to mean in the late-1970s. We see what the rich of the gilded age were like, and how they treated their workers; and we see what corporations of the 70s are like, and how they treat consumers.
In this tension of exploitation and labor, resistance and co-optation, Starbuck’s name is striking: the mate in Moby-Dick who opposed Ahab but could find no support among the crew and so followed the obsessed captain. It’s an irony worthy of Vonnegut that as he wrote the book a coffeehouse by that name in Seattle was about to grow into a major multinational company.
And there’s a further irony that a prominent character in a science-fiction TV show that first aired in 1978 also used the name; for Jailbird gives us a new version of Vonnegut’s recurring character, science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Here “Trout” is the pseudonym of a lifer in the prison where Starbuck opens the novel, a veterinarian who was “the only American to have been convicted of treason during the Korean War” due to involvement with a North Korean honeypot.
In an otherwise relatively realistic novel, summaries of Trout’s stories satirize American life from a science-fictional perspective. In particular, a tale about angels in the afterlife explaining the fairness of the universe to the newly-dead questions the ability of capitalism to make a world which works for everyone.
But mostly the satire in the book draws from 20th-century America history. The trials and execution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are recounted in detail, their idealism a direct counterpart to Starbuck’s naming of names, and their saga undermining the wisdom and justice of the American establishment. Watergate, not a dominant theme in the novel but a reality that hangs over the story and shapes its portrait of society, becomes the latest of a series of injustices linked to the expression of power.
The novel’s short but packed with reflections and incident. It’s oddly post-apocalyptic; Starbuck, in the past, without realizing it, made the fatal choice to abandon his ideals, and has lived through the increasing collapse of everything around him since. But nothing’s ever fully past. Roy Cohn, aide to McCarthy and mentor to Trump, has a notable minor role, seemingly benevolent. But for alert readers in the 1970s his presence would darken the book, and so it is now. One of Vonnegut’s novels most specifically situated in its time, Jailbird turns out weirdly relevant to today, its depiction of the tendrils of American power and injustice diagnosing a living problem.