Deborah Lipp

Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84, and I suspect there will be many obituaries with the same title as mine. (There’s a wonderful and thorough biography in The Guardian.)

I also considered the titles “Hi Ho” and “Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.”

As a teenager I read every novel and short story Vonnegut had written up to that time (and have continued to read his work, albeit less voraciously). I had an amusing exchange with a high school English teacher in a class on the American novel. He handed me Slaughterhouse Five, and when I said I’d already read it, he handed me Cat’s Cradle, and when he went back to the cabinet for a third time, I said “I’ve read that one too” without even looking, so he went back the fourth time and came out with Ethan Frome. Which I hadn’t read.

As a writer, what I’ve learned from Vonnegut is that it’s okay to be simple, and in fact, simplicity is a virtue. And that rhythm matters. Vonnegut wrote in beats. He was a bit of a Luddite, and probably knew nothing of the Internets, but I think he’d have liked the way that blogs play with language. The. Punctuation. Experiments. Changes to rhythm and form. Grammatical anarchy in the cause of a conversational tone of voice. Vonnegut cared about ideas, thoughts, tones, beats, and letting the audience listen. He didn’t tell you what to think; but in a gentle voice, he showed you what he saw, inviting you to see it his way. I don’t recall words like “evil” or “angry” in his work. You just read the events, and met the people, and saw the irony, and made your own decision. Yet for all that, his work was full of morality and caring:

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

(From God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.)

Mr. Vonnegut, you were kind.