Review of Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, AARP: The Magazine, December 2009
From author Sidney Offit to book mavens across the land, everyone seems anxious to let us know that the short stories in Look at the Birdie are substandard Vonnegut. In his introduction to this collection of 14 previously unpublished tales, Offit—a longtime Vonnegut chum, by the way—notes it’s possible they never quite satisfied the author, who died in 2007. And Publishers Weekly magazine claims the pieces, written during Vonnegut’s 20s and 30s, “lack the polish and humor” of his later work.
I’ve read plenty of Vonnegut, early and late, but not for some time, so I decided to approach Look at the Birdie without revisiting, say, such boomer manifestos as Welcome to the Monkey House or Breakfast of Champions. I’m glad I didn’t: in reading the rough-hewn yet complete short stories gathered here, I felt as if I were encountering an undiscovered writer. Vonnegut veers from irony to sentimentality to terror to whimsicality, sometimes in the same piece (I’m thinking of “A Song for Selma,” in which a high-school music teacher’s belief in a student’s hidden brilliance cycles through all those feelings—and more). Full disclosure: I didn’t read the damning-with-faint-praise reviews beforehand, either.
