Jailbird
Kurt Vonnegut, 1979
★ 3.83 from 27.6k ratings on Goodreads
Graphic novels & humour Literary fiction
A Watergate-era ex-con drifts through American labor history and family failure, looking for a decent way to live. A wry, melancholy voice drifts through labor history and family failure, leavened by satirical humor and a moral ache.
Feels like melancholy, humor and tenderness. About society, family and morality.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy Vonnegut’s wry, melancholy satire and stories about ordinary people wrestling with decency. The book drifts through labor history and family failure, so expect a loose, digressive path rather than a tight plot.
Why read it
It gives you a wry, melancholy way to think about guilt, work, and American ideals, with humor that carries moral weight.
A page from the book
The one answer that makes an accusation of ingratitude go quiet.
Congressman Nixon had asked me why, as the son of immigrants who had been treated so well by Americans, as a man who had been treated like a son and been sent to Harvard by an American capitalist, I had been so ungrateful to the American economic system.The answer I gave him was not original. Nothing about me has ever been original. I repeated what my one-time hero, Kenneth Whistler, had said in reply to the same general sort of question long, long ago. Whistler had been a witness at a trial of strikers accused of violence. The judge had become curious about him, had asked him why such a well-educated man from such a good family would so immerse himself in the working class.My stolen answer to Nixon was this: “Why? The Sermon on the Mount, sir.” What readers say
Readers note that Hackwith’s story feels cozy, vulnerable, tender, spooky, and quietly comforting, with a touch of sad uncertainty; it still carries warmth and hope even when things look bleak.
Kurt Vonnegut.Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden during the firebombing; his father was an Indianapolis architect ruined in the Depression, and Vonnegut later taught briefly at Harvard.
Books that feel like this
More by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Vonnegut survived the Dresden firebombing and spent twenty-three years failing to write it straight — so he wrote it as science fiction, jokes and all.
Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut, 1973
A little-read science-fiction hack, a car dealer coming apart, and a narrator who walks into his own book to tell them both the truth.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Jailbird for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy Vonnegut’s wry, melancholy satire and stories about ordinary people wrestling with decency. The book drifts through labor history and family failure, so expect a loose, digressive path rather than a tight plot.
- What is Jailbird like?
- A wry, melancholy voice drifts through labor history and family failure, leavened by satirical humor and a moral ache. Feels like melancholy, humor and tenderness. About society, family and morality.
- What should I read after Jailbird?
- If you liked Jailbird, try The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen) and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley).
A taste of the feed
The arithmetic of cool, and who is left to do the ordinary work.
All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?
The Corrections · Jonathan Franzen
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
The endearing details that make a monster seem human.
He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood
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