One-time influential novelist Kurt Vonnegut became tedious in the last years of his career. When he gave lectures at colleges like Smith students were puzzled about how out of touch he was. After those events journalists laid into him. That's all there in "And So It Goes," a new biography by Charles J. Shields.
In those 415 pages we get the pieces of man who suffered greatly in his youth. He was an outcast in a family and culture which respected science. His family lost their wealth during The Great Depression. His mother couldn't adjust to being ordinary and killed herself on Mother's Day. He was a POW in World War II during the destruction of Dresden by the Allied Forces. Yet, Vonnegut had the focus to leverage that pain into truly original fiction.
So, why did he get distracted and became a caricature of the character he used to be? And how can other aging giants like Clint Eastwood, Betty White, and Hillary Clinton keep their eye on the ball?
The answer might be in framing fan worship as a peril. Vonnegut saw it as his due, almost his salvation. It's been observed that after people develop brandnames it's likely they will get stuck. That's because their attention is taken up with being out there, not being within themselves continuing to do well what differentiated them from the pack. Examples range from Truman Capote to Joseph Heller.
Vonnegut could have stayed Vonnegut.
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