Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

Source of book: I own this.

 

I received a box of books by Vonnegut when a colleague downsized, and I have been working to read through them as I get time. I went with Jailbird because I found a Franklin edition at a library sale, and figured I should read that one next. I also have a cheap paperback from that box, and that is the one I took on a recent backpacking trip - it was light and small, and I really wouldn’t have been particularly sad if it got damaged. (Say, from falling in a lake. Unlikely, but you never know…) 

 

Jailbird is all about the Watergate scandal, plus a bit about the Labor movement a generation before that. The main protagonist is the fictional Walter F. Starbuck, a minor government official, who is wrongly convicted in the scandal because compromising documents were stored in his basement office. 

 

We get Starbuck’s backstory, which ends up involving the Labor movement and Sacco and Vanzetti, his marriage to a holocaust survivor, and his estrangement from his only child. After that, his trial and imprisonment, and his post-prison life which takes a bizarre turn. 

 

A bunch of other stuff is brought into the book during its many digressions. Including the Radium Girls. Surprisingly, the book mentions Roy Cohn in a mildly positive light. (As being a good attorney. Not a good person, which is an impossible case to make. But he was also a shitty lawyer too, a true embarrassment to the profession for his ethical nihilism.) 

 

I also learned a new thing from this book: the cocktail known as a “pousse-cafe.” Have you ever heard of it? I guess they were a thing back in the day. They seem to me to be more about the visual aesthetics than drinkability, but your mileage may vary. 

 

The narrative is strangely linear for Vonnegut, and lacks aliens. Kilgore Trout does make a token appearance, using a pseudonym, and with details that contradict the facts in other books. 

 

I have mixed feelings about the book. On the positive side, it truly sets forth Vonnegut’s political ideas, particularly his support for labor against capital. It also has some brilliant satire of society and government. A few of the characters, including the protagonist, are memorable. 

 

On the other hand, it lacks the human connection that I found in previous books. Slaughterhouse-Five is somewhat autobiographical, as Vonnegut lived through the firebombing of Dresden himself as a prisoner of war. It feels viscerally real. 

 

Likewise, Breakfast of Champions explores mental illness and how people descend into conspiratorial thinking. With characters patterned after Vonnegut’s family, it also feels personal and real. 

 

While I found Starbuck to be a compelling character, his constant dissociation and lack of change meant he felt at a distance. A few other characters flirted with connection, but they were in and out of the book fairly quickly - specifically the four loves of Starbuck’s life, who were fascinating, but then disappeared before you really got to know them fully. 

 

Perhaps this was Vonnegut’s intention - and he himself thought Jailbird was one of his best books. I just found it a bit harder to find that connection and realness that was so apparent in the other books. 

 

This is not to say the book is bad - just not as good (in my opinion) as the others of his I have read. 

 

There are, of course, some great lines - Vonnegut is always incredibly quotable. 

 

Starbuck, after World War Two, admires the new American army and its ostensible goals. Enjoy the snark. 

 

They were to be a thunderbolt with which we could vaporize any new, would-be Hitler, anywhere in the world. No sooner had the people of a country lost their freedom, than the United States of America would arrive to give it back again. 

 

This was written, of course, after the disaster of Vietnam…

 

There is also a digression about a Black prisoner of war held by China. I won’t get into all the details, but this line from the man in question is great. 

 

“They wanted me back, you know,” he told me, “because they were so embarrassed. They couldn’t stand it that even one American, even a black one, would think for even a minute that maybe America wasn’t the best country in the world.” 

 

Some things never change, I guess. 

 

This one is more funny than satirical. 

 

The function of a tuxedo, in fact, is exactly that: to put the wearer into an alternate universe.

 

There is also a strange story about Einstein and auditors (divine auditors, actually), which has an interesting conclusion. 

 

The story was certainly a slam at God, suggesting that he was capable of using a cheap subterfuge like the audits to get out of being blamed for how hard economic life was down here. 

 

The book ends with a rather bizarre twist. I won’t spoil most of it, but there is a bit about the debacle of trying to leave a giant corporation to charity. 

 

What, in my opinion, was wrong with Mary Kathleen’s scheme for a peaceful economic revolution? For one thing, the federal government was wholly unprepared to operate all the businesses of RAMJAC on behalf of the people. For another thing: Most of those businesses, rigged only to make profits, were as indifferent to the needs of the people as, say, thunderstorms. Mary Kathleen might as well have left one-fifth of the weather to the people. 

 

This is a perceptive observation, and gets at one of the reasons that Communism failed. Yes, of course, there are all kinds of problems - Communism was implemented as essentially a religion, and a fundamentalist one at that, rather than as a tool. 

 

But it also retained so much of industrial capitalism that it ended up mostly being a worse, totalitarian form of it. Vonnegut is right - the very structure of industry rigged to make profit isn’t improved because you make the government run it. And hierarchy-based business just changes hierarchies with ownership. 

 

Whether or not you believe that society can go back to a time before industrialization or reverse the trend toward consolidation in business, what is clear is that 18th and 19th Century economic theories and tools have proven wholly useless in addressing the issues we currently face. And that goes for both unregulated capitalism and utopian Marxism. 

 

Vonnegut satirizes both in this book, but doesn’t have clear answers to suggest. I think he is right about that. Solutions will need shifting more power to labor and away from the billionaire class, for sure, but the exact solutions will need to be discovered pragmatically, not ideologically. 

 

Interesting book. Not his best, but worth reading.