There's a Reason Some Books Are Considered Classics

Book Reviewed: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Sometimes, it's hard to understand how a book achieves its status as a literary "classic." I've read a handful of classics that I absolutely hate. I've also read minor works and loved them. What makes a book classic has very little to do with its emotional content or popularity. Rather, it's about a book being resonant with its time. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are made amazing by their artistic reaction to the emerging modern world after war; Dostoevsky's broken moral societies are views into the chaos to come in Russia. Some books are classics because they're just plain good. But most are classics because of what they do within context.

Kurt Vonnegut's famous war novel Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books. It's such a bizarre little novel. It's about war and aliens and time travel and life and death. Trying to describe it to someone is nearly impossible. It starts out in Vonnegut's own voice, then transfers its attentions to Billy Pilgrim, an awkward man who survived being a prisoner of war in World War II Germany and the bombing of Dresden. Billy becomes a successful optometrist who eventually reveals to everyone that he has been abducted by aliens and is simply living his life in little time lapses. He can go forward and backward in time, always by accident. The aliens who have abducted him, the Tralfamadorians, can see all of time at once, a fact that Billy (and seemingly, Vonnegut himself) finds beautiful and preferable to our own world. See why it's hard to describe this book to people?

I first read Slaughterhouse-Five as an awkward high school student. Vonnegut was the favorite writer of my beloved high school writing teacher, so I felt it was necessary I read his most famous work. I wasn't disappointed. I remember really liking the book back then. As a teenager, I was obsessed with war as a literary subject. I loved anti-war novels like crazy. Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the most famous American war novels of all time. It's treatment of war as a bizarre venture and its depiction of Dresden as something so harrowing that it can barely be mentioned is made all the much more poignant by the protagonist's time-travelling. When the book finally hits its final pages, we really get to see the devastation involved in the total destruction of Dresden in World War II. Vonnegut's writing makes Billy's avoidance about talking about the war seems so much more tragic in those final pages. And the book is even more powerful when you consider that it was written just as the Vietnam War was becoming unbearable.

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of those books that absolutely deserves its status as a classic. The writing is plain but powerful, able to be funny and depressing at the same time. Also, for those of you who don't know, the novel is responsible for one of the most famous lines in all of American literature: "So it goes." When Vonnegut died a few years back, that line was all over the place. It's the Tralfamadorian response to death, and it is used so often in the book that it manages to become simultaneously silly and tragic.

This is one of those books that always makes me shake my head and say, "Wow." I really don't know how Vonnegut's mind managed to create something so strangely poetic. Seeing a belated response to devastation in the context of current disaster is what makes this book a classic. It's not necessarily one of my most favorite books, but it is one of the maybe ten or twenty books I think everyone in America should read in his or her lifetime.

Comfort Read!

Recently, a book-loving-librarian-in-training friend pondered the idea of bibliotherapy. Apparently, bibliotherapy is used to help you overcome your problems by becoming absorbed in the problems of people in books. I like this idea. But I think I'm not so much a practitioner of bibliotherapy as I am a practitioner of comfort reading. Comfort reading is simply the reading of well-loved books that help me de-stress and live inside someone else's head for awhile.

For me, comfort reads are always books I've read more than twice, books that can have happy or sad endings but which all must have the ability to put me inside a little cocoon outside my own existence. Admittedly, I'm pretty choosy about my comfort reads. Just because something is a comfort read doesn't mean it's a great book. And just because I've read a book half a dozen times does not make it a comfort read. For example, my all-time favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, is not a comfort read even though I've read it a bajillion times (probably because it's so genius that I have to concentrate too hard on the language, the themes, and the structure to get too comfortable too fast). Conversely, Katherine Mosby's forgettable novel The Season of Lillian Dawes is nowhere near one of my favorite books, but it's one of the first books I go to for comfort. I've read it so often I feel like I actually live in its world.

Anyway, the point of all this is simple. I love me some comfort reads, and lately I haven't indulged in them enough. I remedied that problem this week by picking up one of my most comforting-est comfort books: S.E. Hinton's Tex. By now, you all know how much I love S.E. Hinton. I loved her when I was young, and I still love her now. Without a doubt, Tex is my favorite Hinton novel. Tex is the narrator, a fifteen-year-old small town kid who can't seem to avoid trouble and who's pretty happy-go-lucky. He has a best friend, Johnny, from a rich family that lives down the road, and he's in love with Johnny's sister, Jamie. Hijinks ensue. But the real heart of the story lies in Tex's relationship with his older brother, Mason. Mason, a basketball whiz busy winning scholarships and adoration, is the de-facto parent in the household, since their father is always gone on the rodeo circuit. Mason is something of a control freak, and with a mean streak to boot. But he's trying his best, so much so that he ends up with an ulcer halfway through the book. Some family secrets get unearthed towards the end of the book that really kick things into gear, and the book's ending is wonderfully bittersweet. Overall, it's a pretty basic story.

But Hinton goes beyond the easy punches to create a really wonderful world here. Tex's narration is charming and not always reliable, as the reader sometimes has to come up with her own conclusions about things. Meanwhile, Mason is an absolutely perfect creation. So much so that I might harbor a bit of a crush on the guy. He's not an angel by any stretch of the imagination. He beats the shit out of Tex at the very beginning of the book, and he can kind of be a bastard. Yet, he tries so hard and gets so little credit that you can't help but feel sorry for him. And he totally makes up for it at the end by being a great big brother. Really, the characters are what make this book worth reading over and over again. Hinton is ridiculously good at making even peripheral characters seem alive. Everyone in Tex is capable of good and evil. No one's really a hero, but no one's a flat-out villain either. Instead, people just come across as completely realistic. Even at its most "extreme" moments, it's simply a book about people trying their best, with mixed results. Tex sums up the whole book pretty well in one of its final paragraphs: "I remembered what Jamie had said, that love doesn't solve anything. Maybe. But it helps."

Anyway, I'm done ranting. This is probably my fifth or sixth time reading Tex, and it never gets old for me, even if I've outgrown its intended age-group. I love the characters, I love the setting, and I love Hinton's worldview. When I'm reading this book, I have no time for the real world, which is all I want from a comfort read.