Each of Kurt Vonnegut’s first five novels was funnier than the one before, and also sadder. The fifth, 1965’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, was the quietest, with the simplest plot, but also one of the most significant for Vonnegut’s future work.
Rosewater sees Vonnegut bring back ideas from previous stories, in different forms, and introducing characters who’ll recur in later books in slightly different guises. Read Vonnegut’s fiction as a whole and there’s an echo of the commedia dell’arte; each story has characters with names and personalities you know, who are made to face new situations. In Rosewater we’re first introduced to down-at-heels science fiction writer Kilgore Trout.
The book isn’t Trout’s story, though. It’s about a man who’s Trout’s biggest fan, a wealthy heir to millions named Eliot Rosewater. Rosewater lives in a small Indiana town filled with the unintelligent and unemployable. He helps them financially, and does his best to see them thrive in life. But then a lawyer with Eliot’s family foundation hatches a scheme with a Rosewater relative in Rhode Island to take Eliot’s fortune away.
The thwarting of that scheme gives the short novel most of its plot momentum, but never feels central to the book. The resolution’s clever, but Rosewater reads as a novella if not short story extended to book length. It lives in its character studies, of Eliot, and the townsfolk around him, and of the poor Rosewater relative who tries to get the money, and of Kilgore Trout.
We see a range of people living their lives and doing their best and, often, suffering. Without going into discussions of capitalism or social structures of the 1960s, the book’s about class in America as revealed through individuals. It tackles themes that’ve concerned Vonnegut at least since 1952’s Player Piano: if your society rewards people for being useful and employable, what do you do with the useless and the unemployable? Are those words meaningful, or do they represent an unexamined hypocrisy? How do you love people who have no use in the world?
There’s the sense of an anthology to the book, with Rosewater’s benevolence and financial struggle as the frame for case studies of American life. Oddly, Rosewater’s less vivid than most of the other characters, even the minor ones.
Partly, I suspect, that’s because Vonnegut’s empathy manifests more strongly in describing people who have more problems than the well-off Eliot Rosewater. But partly it’s because Rosewater’s both more intelligent and wiser than the other characters in the book—he’s better able to accomplish what he wants, and take the long view and work out what it is that he wants and why. He also has a good sense of how other people operate, into the bargain.
None of this is unrealistic, but in the context of the novel Rosewater’s on something of an island. He has no peer. He’s terribly lonely for much of the book, and you can understand why. There’s nobody for him to be friends with, nobody who operates on his level. This is something generally true in most of Vonnegut’s novels, especially the early ones; friendship between peers is rare.
It’s no wonder that Rosewater turns to Kilgore Trout as a guru. Loosely based on science fiction master Theodore Sturgeon (note rhyming first names and piscine surnames), Vonnegut uses Trout as a way to present summaries of loopy science-fictional visions without having to write out the stories in full. It works, providing another dimension to the nominally realist story of Eliot Rosewater, and setting up an ending involving Trout as a major element.
Trout’s a more self-aware and self-possessed figure here than in later works. That allows for a contrast between the near-saintly writer and a world in which his works appear in forgotten magazines sold in porn shops. But if Trout’s a writer of escapist fictions, Rosewater’s making escapism real; he’s a benevolent force trying to use his power to make the world better for the people in it.
He’s a man trying to be kind. And so he comes up with the book’s most famous line, to be said at a christening: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you've got to be kind.’”
On its own that’s clever, but the quote’s significant in the context of the novel as a whole, too. The book’s a meditation on the tension between kindness, as exemplified by Rosewater, and a kind of quietism based on an awareness that the world can’t really be changed.
Vonnegut doesn’t give kindness an easy victory, but Rosewater does come down heavily on the side of being kind. The tension plays out differently in Vonnegut’s next two novels. Slaughterhouse-Five gives quietism and inevitability the upper hand, if an equivocal one, while Breakfast of Champion presents a kind of final synthesis of the two things.
After these three books, Vonnegut’s novels change significantly, becoming a series of stories told by a singular personality looking back at their life. The structural pyrotechnics become, mostly, more subdued. That doesn’t make them better or worse, necessarily, but it does make them different.
Vonnegut enters here into a struggle between two major themes, and into a middle period in his novel-writing career. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a short book, with a simple story, but it’s effective, powerful, and important in Vonnegut’s body of work; and, as always with Vonnegut, funny, sad, and sharply-written.