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This book is a tremendous. I just got finished reading it for the third time. The main character is based roughly upon Gorky.
A Prisoner of War in the Hamptons
Date: October 18, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 12, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By JULIAN MOYNAHAN; Julian Moynahan teaches English at Rutgers University and is finishing a book on Irish writing.
Lead: LEAD: BLUEBEARD By Kurt Vonnegut. 300 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $17.95.
Text:
BLUEBEARD By Kurt Vonnegut. 300 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $17.95.
BY the high imaginative standards of Kurt Vonnegut at his best - ''Cat's Cradle'' and ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' come to mind - ''Bluebeard,'' it seems to me, is a minor achievement. It's cast in the form of fictional autobiography and is set in large part in the much-publicized art and writing scene of the Hamptons on Long Island. In a preliminary note the author calls his book a ''hoax autobiography'' and rather defensively remarks that he isn't writing a ''responsible history'' of Abstract Expressionism or, on the other hand, distorting the actual lives of certain ''real and famous'' persons - such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, with whom his autobiographical hero is supposed to have been friendly before their brilliant careers ended in suicide or quasi-suicidal accident.
A certain defensiveness also appears in the title. The book's hero, the Armenian-American Rabo Karabekian, who is in his early 70's, is well aware that he has been a bad husband and father. He is divorced and his grown children will have nothing to do with him. Also he is rather apologetic for having failed as a would-be master in the New York School of 50's painters and sculptors while quite accidentally becoming wealthy from having accumulated without much cash outlay a collection of valuable art from people he used to go drinking with at the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan. He also owns a valuable estate in the former potato fields of Long Island where so many New York artists in the 40's and 50's found studio space, visual stimulation or relief, and summer homes.
However, the specific application of the Bluebeard motif has to do with the mysterious contents of a long, windowless, former potato storage shed on Karabekian's property, which is always locked. He keeps hinting, to the point of tiresomeness, that its contents provide some sort of master key to the design and meaning of his career, and to the various stages of recent history, beginning with the Depression, through which he has lived. Rabo lost an eye, becoming a ''cyclops,'' during World War II, and like Billy Pilgrim of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' and Kurt Vonnegut himself, he was a prisoner of war in Germany.
I shall not divulge the contents of the shed, but will suggest that what is in there is thematically linked to one of Mr. Vonnegut's favorite and perhaps obsessive notions. That is the idea, following such overwhelming 20th-century horrors and atrocities as Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Dresden raid - this last, we remember, was witnessed and survived by the author from his underground vantage point in the German slaughterhouse - that we are all war prisoners, all targets leading forfeited lives, whether we know it or not, and whether or not the particular bomb or bullet with our name on it has yet been sent hurtling toward us.
MR. VONNEGUT has always struck me as a major talent who doesn't always manage to put it all together. In the memoir he is writing, the war survivor Karabekian, who had earlier been apprenticed to a wealthy artist, a master of pictorial realism, describes how his sheer talent exceeded his master's and also how it has failed to unfold. He boasts he could paint anything perfectly and confesses he has found nothing he really wants to say through art.
Rabo has an eccentric house guest, Circe Berman, who devours the installments of the memoir with intense curiosity and without his permission. A wizard novelist of ''adolescent fiction,'' she is as cool as ice-nine, even though her severe insomnia has her lapping up sleeping potions like mother's milk. It's pretty clear she thinks her host's major problem is his bungled relations with her sex. She doesn't, however, offer him another chance nor does he ask for one.
Some readers may be satisfied by what is revealed when the potato shed is unlocked. I wasn't altogether satisfied. Mr. Vonnegut isn't stalling at this stage of his career, but he isn't moving ahead either.
This book is a tremendous. I just got finished reading it for the third time. The main character is based roughly upon Gorky.
A Prisoner of War in the Hamptons
Date: October 18, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 12, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By JULIAN MOYNAHAN; Julian Moynahan teaches English at Rutgers University and is finishing a book on Irish writing.
Lead: LEAD: BLUEBEARD By Kurt Vonnegut. 300 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $17.95.
Text:
BLUEBEARD By Kurt Vonnegut. 300 pp. New York: Delacorte Press. $17.95.
BY the high imaginative standards of Kurt Vonnegut at his best - ''Cat's Cradle'' and ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' come to mind - ''Bluebeard,'' it seems to me, is a minor achievement. It's cast in the form of fictional autobiography and is set in large part in the much-publicized art and writing scene of the Hamptons on Long Island. In a preliminary note the author calls his book a ''hoax autobiography'' and rather defensively remarks that he isn't writing a ''responsible history'' of Abstract Expressionism or, on the other hand, distorting the actual lives of certain ''real and famous'' persons - such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, with whom his autobiographical hero is supposed to have been friendly before their brilliant careers ended in suicide or quasi-suicidal accident.
A certain defensiveness also appears in the title. The book's hero, the Armenian-American Rabo Karabekian, who is in his early 70's, is well aware that he has been a bad husband and father. He is divorced and his grown children will have nothing to do with him. Also he is rather apologetic for having failed as a would-be master in the New York School of 50's painters and sculptors while quite accidentally becoming wealthy from having accumulated without much cash outlay a collection of valuable art from people he used to go drinking with at the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan. He also owns a valuable estate in the former potato fields of Long Island where so many New York artists in the 40's and 50's found studio space, visual stimulation or relief, and summer homes.
However, the specific application of the Bluebeard motif has to do with the mysterious contents of a long, windowless, former potato storage shed on Karabekian's property, which is always locked. He keeps hinting, to the point of tiresomeness, that its contents provide some sort of master key to the design and meaning of his career, and to the various stages of recent history, beginning with the Depression, through which he has lived. Rabo lost an eye, becoming a ''cyclops,'' during World War II, and like Billy Pilgrim of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'' and Kurt Vonnegut himself, he was a prisoner of war in Germany.
I shall not divulge the contents of the shed, but will suggest that what is in there is thematically linked to one of Mr. Vonnegut's favorite and perhaps obsessive notions. That is the idea, following such overwhelming 20th-century horrors and atrocities as Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Dresden raid - this last, we remember, was witnessed and survived by the author from his underground vantage point in the German slaughterhouse - that we are all war prisoners, all targets leading forfeited lives, whether we know it or not, and whether or not the particular bomb or bullet with our name on it has yet been sent hurtling toward us.
MR. VONNEGUT has always struck me as a major talent who doesn't always manage to put it all together. In the memoir he is writing, the war survivor Karabekian, who had earlier been apprenticed to a wealthy artist, a master of pictorial realism, describes how his sheer talent exceeded his master's and also how it has failed to unfold. He boasts he could paint anything perfectly and confesses he has found nothing he really wants to say through art.
Rabo has an eccentric house guest, Circe Berman, who devours the installments of the memoir with intense curiosity and without his permission. A wizard novelist of ''adolescent fiction,'' she is as cool as ice-nine, even though her severe insomnia has her lapping up sleeping potions like mother's milk. It's pretty clear she thinks her host's major problem is his bungled relations with her sex. She doesn't, however, offer him another chance nor does he ask for one.
Some readers may be satisfied by what is revealed when the potato shed is unlocked. I wasn't altogether satisfied. Mr. Vonnegut isn't stalling at this stage of his career, but he isn't moving ahead either.