{"id":410,"date":"2011-05-26T10:19:03","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T17:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=410"},"modified":"2011-05-26T10:20:58","modified_gmt":"2011-05-26T17:20:58","slug":"from-the-days-when-a-story-was-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=410","title":{"rendered":"From the days when a story was a story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Moyer enjoys new stories from an old favorite author, who died in 2007.<\/p>\n

By Robert Moyer<\/p>\n

WHILE MORTALS SLEEP. By Kurt Vonnegut. Delacorte Press. 253 pages. $27.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s because we miss him.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s because the editor put the best of these stories at the back of the book.\u00a0 For whatever reason, these 16 previously unpublished stories by Kurt Vonnegut get more enjoyable as the book progresses.\u00a0In this post-post-modern age of short stories where we can\u2019t find a protagonist, and no epiphany shows up on the horizon, maybe we are just nostalgic for the kind of story Vonnegut wrote when he started writing.<\/p>\n

These stories were crafted for such magazines as Collier\u2019s <\/em>and The Saturday Evening Post<\/em>, mavens of middle-American literary taste before the phrase \u201cmiddle America\u201d was ever used.\u00a0In his adulatory introduction, Dave Eggers defines the style as \u201cmouse trap\u201d stories: \u201cA mousetrap story exists to trick or trap the reader.\u00a0It moves the reader along, through the complex (but not too complex) machinery of the story, until the end, when the cage is sprung and the reader is trapped.\u00a0And so in this kind of story, the character, the setting, the plot \u2013 they\u2019re all more or less means to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n

That \u201cend\u201d usually was something of moral value:\u00a0 \u201cThat being a decent person is an achievable and desirable thing. That faith has value.\u00a0 That wealth solves few problems.\u201d\u00a0Even when Vonnegut was writing for publication, not posterity, he held his values out for all to see.<\/p>\n

The Vonnegut voice and style are sprinkled throughout these stories as well.\u00a0\u201cJenny,\u201d the walking, talking refrigerator with the voice and features of her inventor\u2019s ex-wife, foreshadows the author\u2019s quasi-science fiction pieces.\u00a0Judging a Christmas lights contest, a crusty newspaper editor learns something about the true value of Christmas \u201cWhile Mortals Sleep.\u201d The adverse effects of technology afflict the \u201cGirl Pool,\u201d where the secretaries of the Montezuma\u00a0Forge and Foundry Company sit enslaved by their Dictaphones.\u00a0 The \u201cTango\u201d wreaks havoc on the libidos of a \u201cWasp\u201d colony in New England.\u00a0And a voice teacher secretly staves off a failed musical career by providing dough for doughnuts so the guy can make \u201c$10,000.00 a Year, Easy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not a page turns without a turn of phrase reminding us of the Vonnegut wit:\u00a0 the crusty editor \u201cand the spirit of Christmas had as little in common as a farm cat and the Audubon Society,\u201d and \u201cThe little blades glinted\u201d in the eyes of the girl pool secretary and her supervisor, \u201cwhile they smiled politely.\u201d\u00a0 There is enough of Vonnegut in each of these stories, and certainly in the accumulation, to make us willing prey to what Eggers calls the young mousetrap maker.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bob Moyer enjoys new stories from an old favorite author, who died in 2007. By Robert Moyer WHILE MORTALS SLEEP. By Kurt Vonnegut. Delacorte Press. 253 pages. $27. Maybe it\u2019s because we miss him.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s because the editor put the best of these stories at the back of the book.\u00a0 For whatever reason, these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,89],"tags":[91,90],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","category-short-fiction","tag-short-fiction-2","tag-vonnegut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":413,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}