Vonnegut: irreverence vs irony

Vonnegut died last week. He meant nothing to me -- I'd always dismissed him as one read by people who don't read often and well (like those guys who revere The Doors and Kerouac, not necessarily together or in that order). To be fair, I bought Slaughterhouse-Five this weekend. Well -- what a disappointment. Sophomoric, scattered, morbid in the most obvious manner (no wonder it's often assigned in high school lit classes). Every time Billy Pilgrim punctuates a description of a gruesome death with "So it goes" it's like the honking of a car in heavy traffic. The dust jacket blurbs adduce Orwell, Koestler, Celine, when he's lucky to match Golding. Then there's a really good friend, whose literary judgment I trust, who praised Vonnegut as "the greatest satirist since Twain -- no, he's better than Twain." To be mean, I leafed through the death's-head musings collected in Man Without a Country, then read the chapter in Twain's Europe and Elsewhere called "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"; a more scorching indictment of Bush-era guile and hypocrisy has never been penned, until I remind myself that it was about McKinley and the Spanish-American War.

Before bed last night I read Anthony Hecht's "Persistences." His resplendent brittle surfaces seemed more commensurate with World War II-era eyewitness horrors than Vonnegut's, especially that poem's abrupt, shattering concluding stanzas:

Who comes here seeking justice,
Or in its high despite,
Bent on some hopeless interview
On wrongs nothing can right?

These things disdain to answer,
Though numberless as flakes;
Mine is the task to find out words
For their memorial sakes

Who press in dense approaches,
Blue numerical tattoos,
Writ crosswise on their arteries,
The burning, voiceless Jews.

This is not to suggest that aliens and time travel aren't appropriate media through which to assimilate an experience that refuses to disappear despite psychotherapy and marriage; but there's nothing in Slaughterhouse-Five as jolting as the transition in Hecht's poem, no more ambivalent response to the comfort of aesthetic distance. Plainly Vonnegut assumed that, in a climate in which Portnoy's Complaint and Myra Breckinridge were best-sellers, irreverence proved its own reward. Is it enough? Doubtless I have to read more Vonnegut.