by Kurt Vonnegut.

Putnam. 232 pages. $24.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

Kurt Vonnegut exploded onto the literary scene in the 1960s and ’70s as a cult figure and querulous guru, appalled at the way things were going in terms of Vietnam and elsewhere. I picked him up at the airport once to drive him to a talk and admired the rucks and seams in his wide face and wild curly hair, having relished such works as Slaughter-House Five and Cat’s Cradle.

The man was haunted by the unnecessary destruction of beautiful Dresden by the Allies in February 1945. From that moment he seemed mesmerized by the postmodernist’s disbelief in all “Great Principles” as espoused by politicians and their ilk. A “disgust with civilization,” as he had experienced it as a POW, never was very far from his comic, jaundiced eye, and he became a kind of latter-day Mark Twain, aghast at what America was doing in the guise of freedom and democracy.

His curdled fables were embodied in a playful wit and colloquial style, a kind of bitter lyricism that involved time travel and inventive quirky plots, something that always seemed to distance his fiction from the depths of true passion and dismay. Comedy rescued the disgust in his brash breezy lines, which I always found somewhat facile and dismissive.

This new collection, put together by his son Mark (Vonnegut died a year ago this month), shows him at his best and worst. The satiric parables seem obvious and strained, but when he creates characters who suffer and question the world around them, he’s at his best.

In “Happy Birthday, 1951” an old man leads a young boy out into the countryside from the ruins of a European city to celebrate his birthday. The man enjoys the silence and the scene, but the boy is fascinated only by rusted tanks and other detritus of war that remain in place.

Two of the best characters are Louis in “Brighten Up” and George Fisher in “Just You and Me, Sammy.” These guys are hustlers, wheeler-dealers who know how to schmooze with the German guards in the prison camp, trade off cigarettes and bread, and collaborate in the most elaborate and clever ways. We despise what they’re up to but admire their sly panache and speechifying. The outcome of each tale, particularly the latter, is surprising and shocking, but in these tales real folks move and matter.

My favorite is “The Commandant’s Desk” in which a Czech cabinetmaker and his widowed daughter are still regarded by the victorious Americans as the enemy. The brutal Major Evans lords it over them and seems no different from the Germans who’ve recently been jettisoned from their conquerors’ posts. People who love war exist on all sides of battle, and Vonnegut scathingly mocks and dismembers them.

“Can’t you ever be serious?” someone once asked Vonnegut. “No,” he replied, which is both the joy and curse of his fiction. ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT,

samcoale@cox.net