THE WRITER'S CRUSADE

During World War II, Vonnegut was a prisoner of war and witness to the bombing of Dresden, which killed an estimated 25,000 civilians. That experience fueled one of his best-loved novels, which blended science fiction with a more conventional tale of war trauma. In interviews, the author could be hard to pin down about the book, sometimes underplaying the impact of his war experiences, sometimes snarky, sometimes openly candid about it. “In Dresden I saw a mountain of dead people,” he once said. “And that makes you thoughtful.” Veteran magazine journalist Roston attempts to engage with the novel and the author’s life to determine if Vonnegut suffered from what we would now call PTSD. He recognizes this as something of a fool’s errand; Vonnegut’s son Mark believes he did, but the novel resists such simple interpretation, being so multivalent and written over nearly a quarter-century. Still, Roston’s efforts are fruitful. He explores how the nature of war trauma has changed in the past century, with special attention to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who’ve channeled their experiences into fiction. Matthew Mellina, one writer/vet with PTSD, was so struck by Vonnegut’s conceit of the novel’s hero, Billy Pilgrim, being “unstuck” that he had the word tattooed on his arm. Roston’s byways into PTSD history and other writers' work can sometimes draw him a fair distance from Vonnegut, and the book’s central question remains unresolved. But he successfully reenergizes a major work from a writer whose star has faded somewhat. New wars, and more recent fiction about them, may have overshadowed Slaughterhouse-Five, but Roston persuasively shows how the novel speaks both to Vonnegut’s moment and to our own.

A rangy, occasionally rambling portrait of one of our stranger, more enduring war novels.