Kurt Vonnegut: Galapagos

Usually when a one realizes how a trick is done, the magician's spell is broken.  Not so with Vonnegut.  I have read enough of his work that a pattern has become clear:  each book succeeds on the deft juggling of three tricks.  Each of his maneuvers is a staple of writers everywhere; none of them is unique to this writer. But a combination of his refusal to repeat himself--never executing any of his moves in the same way twice, a wildly creative imagination, and a fearless willingness to take seemingly absurd premises to a satisfactory conclusion, causes each of his books to come out as a fully realized, unique philoso-literary tapestry that is part of a greater multiptych.

Trick one: An amusing orthographic or lexical innovation.  In Galapagos, this is manifest as an asterisk before the name of characters who are about to die.  Because why not?  The asterisk in Breakfast of Champions was used in the same way to entirely different, rather more intestinal ends.

Trick two: A driving structural conceit.  In Galapagos: the story is gradually revealed to have been written by the ghost of a dock worker.  In the air.  With his immaterial finger.  See also: the memoir conceit of Bluebeard, the novel within a novel of Champions, etc.

Trick three, which is not really a trick: A brilliant and insightful kernel of truth about the way Vonnegut sees the world and existence, and which invariably happens to be something this reader wanted or needed to hear.  In Galapagos, the central idea is that everything bad that ever happened is because of our big, dumb, human brains and our need to do something with them.  How true!  Even now, I can be seen wondering about what this book means and how to analyze it, instead of glorying in its humor and aphorism.  And as soon as I hit publish, no doubt I am going to start using all my extra brain on the problem of what I should do with my life, what is my purpose for existing, and what on earth I mean by "I" anyway.  How silly these big brains of ours are!  How unnecessary and troublesome!  Who can doubt that it would be better swim all day, rut in the sand without wonder, and then fart wetly to the unanimous laughter of our peers?