Rating: ★★★★☆
Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Title: Cat's Cradle
ISBN: 9784001149128 Genre: Science Fiction & Satire
Publisher: Dell, 1973
Page Count: 191 pages
Synopsis: Cat's Cradle deals with atomic scientists, ugly Americans, gorgeous sex queens, vengeful midgets, Caribbean dictators, undertakers, Hoosiers, a new way of making love, ice-nine, Bokononism, the end of the world... Ice-nine? Bokononism? The End of the World? No one but Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., could have created this masterful mix of satire, fantasy and all-too-real realism. An ultimate commentary on modern man and his madness, Cat's Cradle is one of the most brilliant and important novels of the decade.
I reviewed this book already on my Goodreads, but I wanted to setup this blog with some reviews as I play with this to determine how committed I am to a book/writing blog. There are spoilers in this review, but this book is also 50 years old. This is probably more analysis than review, but it was a good one to start this blog with.
I got this very worn copy of Cat's Cradle from a secondhand store in the town over. It was already a bit in shambles when I got it, but I had to even mend the binding with tape when I took it across the country one trip back to Atlanta. So, please forgive me for its well-loved condition...
I shifted a bit between a 3 and 4 star-rating for this. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., always elicits that confusion for me. On the one hand, I love his straightforward prose that feels journalistic and intentional, yet how he can make a book like this one spiral into some type of insane narration. But there are also pieces of Cat's Cradle that feel part of its time—passive sexism and prejudice that reeks of the '70s. However, given the nature of the plot, and the way the story is told, I am still trying to determine if that's a historical artifact or commentary.
Cat's Cradle follows a writer, who identifies himself as John only once at the beginning of the book. He's set off to discuss his adventures following the life of Dr. Felix Hoenniker—and later Hoenniker's eccentric family. What starts off as a story about documenting one of the "founding fathers" of the atomic bomb's life, quickly turns into a strange adventurous tale that almost felt inspired by Gulliver's Travels in some way. In fact, John references the classic at least once.
The architectural conceit of Cat's Cradle is in how it makes you believe it is setup to be a linear narrative with little straying off course. The first couple of sections really leave you to believe the point at which it starts is where it might end. But Vonnegut sets up Cat's Cradle to mimic the lack of pointedness of it all, the overarching tongue-in-cheek theme. Despite stating the main character was a Christian before Bokonism, John repeatedly inserts vocabulary and proverbs from Bokonism into each section. Even before Bokonism is a relevant part of John's life, sequentially speaking, tainting his overall reverence to his past and where his life and perspective was at that time.
The narrative is segmented into conversations and revelations. The segments do continuously tell a story, but not in the way a character might put one foot in front of the other. Nearly each one ends on a witty note that relates to the research John is doing, or life itself.
"What is the secret of life?" I asked. "I forget," said Sandra. "Protein," the bartender declared. "They found out something about protein." "Yeah," said Sandra, "that's it." The girls sang "O Little Town of Bethlehem." I am not likely to forget very soon their interpretation of the line: "The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight."
He shuddered, "Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead."
Truth
One of the main themes of Cat's Cradle is truth. Where it lives, the lack of it, how we convey it. John's intentions were to find the truth of who Dr. Felix Hoenniker was. He states that his original book was to be a Christian one of an account of what "important Americans had done on the day when the fist atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan." Labeling this as Christian felt awfully poignant and funny, as American patriotism—particularly in the 1960s—required a healthy fear of God with your red, white, and blue. This is also seen much later in the book when two wholehearted American Christians are thrilled by an air show in San Lorenzo wherein cutouts of the world's most notorious dictators of the time (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, etc.) were lined up to be shot down.
"They got practically every enemy that freedom ever had out there," H. Lowe Crosby declared.
The Crosbys romanticized their own patriotism, whose nation's enemies were tyrants reduced to comic book villains. Separated by only a decade or more from the last global conflict, they had begun to reminisce on complete terror with only the memories of how America won. They carry with them the same sense of priority found in most Americans in the '60s (and even today). This feeling is also echoed by Claire Minton on the same plane where John meets the Crosbys:
[John:] "I guess Americans are hated a lot of places." "People are hated a lot of places." Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty.
Every character throughout the book has their own version of the truth. Each Hoenniker child (now adult) tells a different story about their deceased father. Frank considers himself most like him—a man good at one thing and it's not people. Angela considers him the greatest man of all time—stripped of her childhood to care for her family in the absence of her late mother. Newt considers him the most comical and scary man of all—constantly speaking to his disconnect and inattentiveness.
My Bokonoist warning is this: Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it.
Bokonism has words for every equal and opposite. In the first section of Cat's Cradle, we're introduced to one of our first Bokonist terms, karass. A karass is a term intended for those you find allegiance with—familial recognition, team alliance, a friendly love. It's one of the most important words throughout the book, but the writing almost tricks you into missing that point until much later.
How John assigns members to his karass seemed exclusionary, and as if he was always missing the people in front of him who had the most to say. He was a character constantly searching and never receiving that which he thought he deserved. On the opposite end of that spectrum was the granfalloon, a Bokonist's term for a "false karass." It was saved for those always most reaching for a karass. It is similar to the allegiances we blindly take. We might superficially attach ourselves to other Americans, feeling a sense of camaraderie therein undeserved.
Hazel Crosby does something similar in her attachment to all Hoosiers, and her desire to have them all call her "Mom"—a seemingly childless mother seeking family in all things familiar. But as you weave through the narrative, finding John declaring this man or that woman his karass—and keeping in mind that all of Bokonism teaches mainly lies—you learn all of these declared kin are merely for comfort.
The Hook
Throughout the island, which has been colonized and abandoned by numerous European and American entities over the centuries, a similar iconography to Christianity littered the dictatorially ruled San Lorenzo. The Hook by which practicing Bokonists were hung once every couple of years, and the one reserved for Bokonon himself, resembled the crucifix in Christendom. It was a performance, a show. Much like the air show full of dictators to be shot down. Or the way Hazel clenches a Hoosier's arm as she demands they call her "Mom." Or the way John later makes love to Mona despite their both complete indifference when it was over.
Mona
I don't know where to start with this. The cons of Cat's Cradle are minimal, and even they I'm still working out if they are intentional in some way. Let's start with some easy ones. No, I'm not talking about how the word "midget" is used in a book, and the edition I own, was published in 1968. That seems pedantic. I can read with the time's eyes.
No, the first thing I noticed was the treatment of Mona.
When he first sees Mona it is on the cover of a magazine, he exposits about her beauty for an entire paragraph. He does the same two more times (at least) when he daydreams of her and meets her later. There is a part of me that took great pause reading this. Even through a comedic lens, this overbearing way of speaking of women—as male authors often do—felt like another instance of the "male gaze" inserting itself where it doesn't belong. After internalizing how much he desired this woman on the cover of a magazine for quite some time, he is heartbroken to find she is engaged to Frank Hoenniker. His lamenting was very territorial in that way that all who think they're being romantic are about the subject of their affections. Despite the fact that Mona was never his, despite the fact that Mona never would be.
When John finds information on Mona in Castle's manuscript, there were multiple index entries to indicate Mona was someone who wanted her freedom, hated being the poster woman of San Lorenzo, and hated being moved between fatherly figure to fatherly figure, man to man. Yet despite all of this, it was if John could only read her name on the page and declared how beautiful she was once more. This was pretty obviously a joke from Vonnegut, but I again hesitated to give too much credit where credit was due when several sections later, her breasts are described as pomegranates. Was this Vonnegut's way of poking fun at the men who do so unironically?
See the cat? See the cradle?
Cat's Cradle is the title of the novel, the title of a section, the name of a child's game, and a recurring theme. Put simply by Newt, it's a game of deceit.
This game of string is supposed to be worked out with other players, and in the center you build a cradle for the cat. But as Newt points out, it never looks like a cradle, and there is never any cat. Still, people play. Is it just another way to pass the time? Is it the idea that you're working towards a reward you'll never see? Did the people of San Lorenzo die and find Heaven?
Someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end...
