God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut

I've been re-reading Vonnegut novels, slowly - Slaughterhouse-Five in 2019, Breakfast of Champions in 2023. And now I came to the book just before them, 1965's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

I read it long, long ago - as a teenager, I think, during that first Vonnegut phase that a lot of teenage readers go through. It's the Vonnegut novel with the quote that's stuck with me the most, the one that I really do think encapsulates all of Vonnegut's concerns and obsessions. I usually just quote the end of it, but I want to present the whole thing this time.

This is a novel about capitalism, to be blunt - or, more specifically, about the role of unearned dynastic wealth in a society. The main character, Eliot Rosewater, is a Vonnegutian oddball, whose sanity is a major question in the novel. He's fabulously rich, but lives, at this point, quietly in his family's ancestral seat in Indiana, running a Foundation that mostly consists of him giving small sums of money to woe-begotten locals and providing moral support to them on the phone. He's been asked to baptize the newly-born twin daughters of a local woman, even though he's not religious. He says he couldn't get out of it.

"What will you say? What will you do?"

"Oh - I don't know." Eliot's sorrow and exhaustion dropped away for a moment as he became enchanted by the problem. A birdy little smile played over his lips. "Go over to her shack, I guess. Sprinkle some water on the babies, say, 'Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--:

"God damn it, you've got to be kind.'"

I almost want to just leave it there. Vonnegut novels are loose, shaggy assemblages, held together by his obsessions and his sentences, always more carefully constructed than they seem, and writing in detail about them can make them seem trite or small or silly. Like all his novels, Rosewater is not terribly plotty; it runs through a number of characters and scenes - if I were being pretentious, I'd say motifs - before coming to something like an ending that mostly sums up everything that happened before. The other elements of Rosewater include Eliot's distant cousin and his family in Connecticut, a rapacious young lawyer, Eliot's very "red in tooth and claw" Republican Senator father, and, as Vonnegut puts it in the opening sentences of the novel, "a sum of money."

Vonnegut is clear-eyed in Rosewater. Everyone knows the Rosewater Foundation isn't going to save the world, or even save any of the people it helps. The narrative voice admits that the poor, downtrodden people of Rosewater County, Indiana are pretty lousy people, who will take advantage of any out and can't be expected to better themselves in any way. It basically says that all people are like that - that, all in all, people are not very nice, good, or useful. What Eliot, and his Foundation, do is to help a subset of those lousy people, the ones the worst off in this particular place, to make sure they can keep going. To let them get as much of that hundred years at the outside. Even if they don't get good jobs and upstanding lives and contribute meaningfully to the public.

Vonnegut is as stark as he can be here. They deserve help because they're here, because they're human, because they're alive. That's all they needed to do to be worth it. To be babies. To be born into a world round and wet and crowded. Because we all have got to be kind.

And, of course, Rosewater is mostly about people not being kind, because Vonnegut was not an optimist. He might have been a visionary, but he knew very well his visions didn't correspond to the actual world. And that's what his novels were about. Rosewater is more focused on money than most, as one particular element of the modern world that makes it hard for people to live, but all of his novels took particular elements and made them central, at the same time as the bulk of the concerns and insights and thoughts were broadly similar: people are not all that great. But they're all we have. We need to treasure what we actually do have, and, more than anything else, be kind to each other.

(Note: I read this in the Library of America omnibus Novels & Stories, 1963-1973, and, as always, I highly recommend LoA editions for any writers they publish. The books are elegant and a pleasure to read, with good scholarly notes and the best texts available.)