Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Brief thoughts on Player Piano.

Through the perils and necessities of war, America has become a thoroughly automated, thoroughly class-divided society: the high-IQ, PhD carrying managers and engineers run the production lines (that is, they supervise the machinery) while the average citizen (low IQed) lives comfortably in his or her prepackaged, government subsidized home. While you might scoff at the idea of your entire life being determined solely on the result of a few test scores (and subject to the rigidity of machine logic), don't fret: everyone gets a television. The American dream.

Paul Proteus, the illustrious manager of the Ilium works and son of a national hero of wartime industry, loses touch with the spirit of the age. He is disillusioned with the idea that machines make life better: that the increasingly mechanized/automated aspects of human life increase the quality thereof. Though he has never known life without machines, he instinctively feels mankind (though, decidedly not womankind, as the novel lacks any strong female character) has lost part of its essence, its definitiveness.

The picture of an entirely automated existence where every citizen's lifestyle is maintained (read: checked) through a complex infrastructure of machinery originally appealed to me. As a blogger/ gmail/ greader/ google doc/ twitter/ facebook/ digsby/ ff3/ google desktop/ obsessively-GTD user, I understandably was drawn to Vonnegut's post-bellum world. But so much potential was lost on me after the first 100 pages. The story develops slowly and only begins to draw momentum toward the final chapters. Although a slow-paced narrative could easily be overcome through complex characterization or philosophical musing, Vonnegut (characteristic of his later style) attempts neither. The figure of Paul, unlike the stably stoic Billy Pilgrim, shimmers hazily just on the edge of the narrative, haphazardly jumping into the spotlight from time to time to assert... well, nothing consistent. At best, he's a Prufrock, and a mildly-placid one at that.

Glancing over the reviews of the work on LibraryThing, many readers think this early work permits glimpses of a future style characteristic of Vonnegut. Indeed. I would go further to say that Player Piano tries to hard to be not-Vonnegut. This resistance to that later style results in a thinly spread novel that tries in spite of its creator to pull back upon itself.