God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater | Kurt Vonnegut | Another masterpiece from Vonnegut

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater | Kurt Vonnegut | "Money is a dehydrated Utopia"

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God Bless You, Mr....

	God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1998 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 81 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Another masterpiece from Vonnegut

In "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favorite authors) takes on the class system, capitalism, and philanthropy to splendid, wickedly funny -- and hopelessly accurate -- effect. It is the tale of the Rosewater family, which has amassed a fortune totalling $87,472,033.61 and devised an elaborate foundation to protect their money from the American government that would try to tax it away from them. Through meaningless acts of "charity" (such as loaning expensive art to a museum for an exhibition, and then taking it back) the foundation ensures that the Rosewater fortune will always be firmly controlled by the Rosewater family. Trouble brews when an ambitious young lawyer decides to prove that the current foundation head, Eliot Rosewater, is crazy so that an estranged cousin can take over -- getting the lawyer a nice chunk of the family fortune in the process. This will not be so difficult to do because Eliot has been doing the unthinkable since taking over the foundation from his Senator father: he has been using it to do actual charitable work. You see, Eliot suffered a breakdown after accidentally killing three innocent firefighters (one a mere fourteen years old) in Europe during WWII. Desperate to atone for his mistake, Eliot has returned to his hometown of Rosewater, Indiana to make a difference in the world. Within a year he has spurned the wealthy families in town who aspire to his company and come to be revered by the impoverished townsfolk as a saint. He helps anyone who needs it -- in one instance he has an abusive husband arrested, then turns around and hires him a lawyer when he can't afford one on his own. To the world at large these are the actions of a man who has totally lost his mind. But has he?

Vonnegut masterfully navigates the reader through the saga of the Rosewater clan and the novel's themes with only one stumble to be found in the all-too quick ending. The rest of the book forgives this mistake. You can't go wrong with Vonnegut, and in "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" the remarkable author is at his satiric best.

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"Money is a dehydrated Utopia"

God Bless you Mr. Rosewater is a challenge to fight for social justice and to support the humanist motto if "God da-n it, you've got to be kind." In his classic opening sentence, Vonnegut says "A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a story about bees." Vonnegut uses skittish plots and a variety of curious characters to lay out a picture of America that is becoming more stratified by money and access to power. As the main character, the ill-begotten fortune is given a birth (original accumulation by Noah Rosewater who sent a substitute to the civil war, allowing him to stay home and make millions in the war effort) and a death (Eliot's surprise decision at the end).

Pisquontuit, Rhode Island and Rosewater County, Indiana are the principle settings for the book and both are everyday small towns comprised of wealth and poverty. Vonnegut describes the inhabitants of each as "The lives led there were nearly all paltry, lacking in subtlety, wisdom, wit or convention - were precisely as pointless and unhappy as lives led in Rosewater, Indiana." The stratification of wealth is most poignantly illustrated in his depiction of Pisquontuit, where Fred Rosewater intermittently enters the drugstore that has the coffee shop for the rich, then the news store that has the coffee shop for the poor.

Although America's rich have devised laws to propagate their wealth untouched through the generations, you can still gain access to the "money river" by becoming a "slurper." Norman Mushari, young lawyer, learned in law school that, "just like a good airline pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer always be looking for situations were large amounts of money were about to change hands." Hence comes the plot line. Eliot Rosewater is the heir to the $87,472,033.61 Rosewater fortune. To make sure he gets his dibs, Mushari wants to prove that Eliot is insane thereby redirecting the money river to a distant cousin, Fred Rosewater, in Pisquontuit.

Besides Elliot Rosewater and Fred Rosewater, the third important Rosewater is Senator Lister Ames Rosewater. Clearly, he personifies the idea proposed by the subtitle "pearls before swine." Similar to Ebenezer Scrooge prior to his visits from Christmas ghosts, Senator Rosewater represents the attitude of the aristocratic rich that social programs and wealth reallocation initiatives are frivolous because we should not waste good things on people who will not appreciate them.

In usual Vonnegut style, the reader is clearly and repeatedly presented the theme of the book in no uncertain terms. Early in the book, he writes "When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated a folly of the founding fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors hadn't made it a law in the utopia that wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who love expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone."

Again, later in the book, Kilgore Trout has this to say in reference to Eliot's apparent capricious financial support of his neighbors' needs: "Well... what you did in Rosewater County was far from insane. It was quite easily the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with the problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: how to love people who have no use?"

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Vonnegut's Best Shot at The Great American Novel

Out of all Vonnegut's novels, this is by far the best. One reason is that there are no sci-fi trappings, no silliness about time travel or aliens, nothing but a real study of American history and the impact of wealth and greed on the ideal of democracy. While short and exceedingly easy to read, the book feels like an epic narrative, since it sweeps from the very rich to the very poor, from the battlefields of the Civil War to the modern sailing playgrounds of the very rich. It feels much longer and richer than it is in terms of page count alone.

For the first and last time, Vonnegut takes the time to outline a realistic setting,Rosewater County Indiana, and observes the effects of poverty there with all the power (but none of the sentimentality) of John Steinbeck at his best. At the same time he cuts back to New York, writing about the rich Rosewater clan and the wealthy families of Pisquontuit with all the power (but none of the sentimentality) of Edith Wharton. Last of all, he uses a brilliant series of flashbacks to describe America's tragic fall from the courage and carnage of the Civil War to the squalor and self-indulgence of America today. The Civil War sections alone are unique in Vonnegut's work; he captures the horror of the casualty rates without in any way denying or shying away from the ideals of the Union Army. He writes about the civil war with all of the power (but none of the sentimentality) of Southern apologists like Charles Frazier.

Eliot Rosewater is an ideal American hero,and a fascinating foil to Billy Pilgrim in SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. Both are All-American guys. But where Billy is an average Joe, Eliot is a scion of wealth and privilege. Where Billy is a ninety eight pound weakling, Eliot is a sailing and tennis champ. Billy is a one-dimensional anti-war propaganda device, (too "pure" to acquire even the most basic military discipline) while Eliot is a much-decorated officer who fights well and suffers as only a brave man can.

The greater power of Eliot Rosewater means that the stakes are much higher. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Eliot is not a passive weakling but a crusader who sacrifices wealth and privilege to help the poor. His warmth, gentleness and paternal concern for the less fortunate are rendered with tenderness and humor. Vonnegut creates a convincing modern day saint and gives him a real experience among fully realized victims of modern America.

As always in Vonnegut, the few flaws in the book all involve women. Eliot's wife Sylvia is flayed raw again and again as a spoiled socialite who simply can't muster up the gumption to stand by Eliot's side. Vonnegut apologizes for her -- but with a sneer. He never seems to have realized that not all women are as fragile and treacherous as his own mother, who, as he never gets tired of telling us, abandoned him by committing suicide at an early age. By the same token, Fred Rosewater of Rhode Island, Eliot's distant cousin, is rendered as gentle and long-suffering, while his wife Caroline is a one-dimensional shrew. Vonnegut can't get away from an instinctive hostility to women as women, as if the mere biological condition of womanhood were some sort of moral weakness.

His social criticism, as bracing as it is, often suffers as a result. For example, in the Rhode Island section, he feels like lashing out at the rich, so he writes (quite memorably) "four fat, stupid, silly widows in furs were laughing over a bathroom joke printed on a cocktail napkin." Hell of a sentence! Sounds like Joseph Cotten in SHADOW OF A DOUBT. But what does it really mean?

What's odd here is that Vonnegut is attacking the rich, only it seems he only means women. And what he hates about women is that they know about sex? That they enjoy sex? That sex exists? That somehow wanting sex killed off the men folk? As Thackeray's Becky Sharp puts it, he leaves women under the weight of an accusation that is, after all, unspoken.

Still, this is the one Vonnegut book that really has the feel of a fully accomplished novel, a genuine American classic. It has moral depth and epic scope that he never achieved again.

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Overlooked, but worthy

For me this wasn't on the level of Breakfast of Champions, Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, etc but it was still very enjoyable and thoroughly Vonnegut.

It's a quick read, and worthy of an afternoon or two beneath a tree.

Another Vonnegut Winner

This Kurt Vonnegut novel looks at Eliot Rosewater, a rich eccentric who decides to make the world (or at least his town) a better place. Rosewater is rich, drunk, blessed with a social conscience, and he sets out to help improve the lives of the lonely, the ignored, and the losers in the town of Rosewater, Indiana. For this philanthropy Rosewater is seen as insane or close to it. The story looks at both Mr. Rosewater and some of the people whose world he brightens. The book is a bit depressing at times, but contains a powerful message and quite a bit of critique at greed, hypocrisy and other human frailties. Some may note the similarity of two names (Rosewater, Roosevelt) who believed in helping people. This novel doesn't have quite the power of Vonnegut's top works like SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, but it's an entertaining read.

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