If you’re surprised that Kurt Vonnegut was an unhappy man, you’re not paying attention. But the response to And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields’s Vonnegut biography, indicates that a whole lot of people don’t want to remember the author that way. Critics of the book—including Vonnegut’s son, Mark, in an e-mail to science fiction blog io9.com—claim that Shields had access to Vonnegut only at the very end of his life, when he was, in his son’s estimation, “a much diminished 84-year-old.” Shields’s portrayal of Vonnegut as a depressed and bitter person who was obsessed with his public perception is unfair, Mark continues, asking, “Why don’t people employ a modicum of critical thinking before buying into the truth of a book whose existence is completely and utterly dependent on a picture that Shields would have made up out of whole cloth if he had to.”
Those are serious charges to levy against a biographer. And it feels like an over-the-top assault against Shields, who with And So It Goes has assembled a thorough, if workmanlike, biography of Vonnegut—the first serious attempt at a complete life story of the man since his death in 2007…This is not to say that Shields’s portrait is flattering. Vonnegut holds grudges, his heart breaks when bad reviews of his books are published, and his personal life is a wreck, fraught with the kind of painful, un-self-aware dramas that would only be acceptable if they were committed by a college freshman. Sometimes the smallness intoxicates the biographer and foils his better judgment: Shields underplays the single most important moment of Vonnegut’s life—his survival in captivity at the firebombing of Dresden during World War II—and basically applies equal weight to a detailed description of one of Vonnegut’s extramarital affairs…
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