Collection rewrites Vonnegut

'Armageddon' satisfies fans

ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT. By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Putnam. 240 pages. $24.95.

At what point, exactly, did Kurt Vonnegut Jr. cease to be merely a cleverly soulful novelist and put on the miter of a mournful secular saint?

It could have been a function of age (he was 84 when he died in April 2007), but there was a quasi-funereal sadness to much of his 21st-century writing, particularly his essays lamenting the nation's collective descent into madness during the Bush years. These formed the bulk of his 2007 collection, "Man Without a Country," and when he died less than three months after its release, the volume looked an awful lot like an epitaph.

Which is why "Armageddon in Retrospect," an eclectic collection of letters, stories and literary whatnot, comes as welcome relief for Vonnegut fans. If "Man Without a Country" was a Midwestern keening for American values that we trampled in our post-9/11 rush to vengeance, "Armageddon in Retrospect" is a far more intimate and satisfying document.

The collection is blessed by one of the most readable and enjoyable introductions encountered in years. Vonnegut's son, author/physician Mark Vonnegut, describes his father in intimate, unsentimental terms, revealing a man tormented and unaffected, an obsessive rewriter who embodied both the hopeless skeptic and the noble humanist. The introduction alone is worth the cover price.

The stories on display are all fine allegories and instantly recognizable as Vonnegut. But the standout piece is neither essay nor fiction: It's the letter that Pfc. Vonnegut wrote to his parents after finally reaching safety at the conclusion of World War II.

Vonnegut explains every improbable event from his capture by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge to his ultimate liberation. Weariness and disbelief permeate every sentence, yet there is a distinctive lilt to his tales of horror.

There is, in that single letter from 1945, a road map to everything he would become. It stands as a reminder to the rest of us, too, that even the most forelorn hope sometimes prevails despite our protests. And so it goes.