• Full Title: Player Piano
• Author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Year: 1952 (mine was a 2006 trade paperback)
• Genre: Science Fiction, Utopia/Dystopia
• Publisher: Dial Press
• ISBN 978-0-385-33378-8 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia Page

 

Summary

Also published as Utopia 14 (in 1954), Player Piano was Vonnegut’s first novel. The narrative follows the life of Dr. Paul Proteus, manager of factory in fictional Ilium, New York, from his comfy office to his impending [no spoilers!] The background is a United States that has been fully given over to automation — at least the kind that could be imagined in 1952. Machines that seem backward and stupid to us, but which seemed gleaming and futuristic to Vonnegut, used punch cards and magnetic tape recordings to make all kinds of decisions, or perform basic rote tasks. The primary plot has Proteus beginning to doubt parts of modern life, especially after he converses with some of the people “across the river” — the men and women put out of work by all the machines. A secondary plot follows the shah of Bratpuhr as he tours the U.S.; I suspect Vonnegut used this angle in order to show events that couldn’t be described well from Proteus’s viewpoint — and also for humor and an outside source of commentary.

I learned after reading that the “war” in the novel is supposed to be a fictional third world war. While reading, and based on contextual clues, I assumed the book referred to an alternate history of the Second World War. By contextual clues, I mean the references to home life, the slang used by soldiers Proteus overhears on a train, and so on — all of which sound a lot like the 1950s.

 

What I Liked Least About It

As with many novels of this era, I experienced some distaste at phrasing. For example: “Though he was seventy, his hair was as thick and black as a twenty-year-old Mexican’s.” And using “colored” and “Negro” to refer to the only black person in the book, in addition to a poor attempt at black American patois: “An’ evah last time some’un come on pas’, they hits ‘at ‘lectric eye, and ol’loudmouth, he just naturally gotta shoot off his big bazoo.” To his credit, Proteus doesn’t seem to treat this “small, elegant young Negro” any different than he does any other characters in the book. There were a few similar ideas regarding women and men, though Vonnegut was careful to make the old-fashioned ideas come from his characters and not from the narrator.

Other than these few dated items (which one can expect in quite a few books from the time period), I found little to dislike about Player Piano.

 

What I Liked Most About It

This is only my second Vonnegut novel; my only comparison is Slaughterhouse-Five. But I enjoyed this far more than I did Slaughterhouse-Five. The narrative was linear, and the author never breaks the Fourth Wall — though there is a bit of self-referential material at one point.

It also contains far more words than did Slaughterhouse-Five, which was in length more like half a book; Player Piano is a normal-length novel. Still it read easily and quickly.

I liked that the subject matter is still of concern today. Though much of the specific technology is clearly dated (punch cards, magnetic tape, etc.), the general idea is still with us: many jobs once fulfilling to humans and mastered by humans are now done by machines. And more is coming; advances in computing and programming are reaching levels rarely foreseen, even in science fiction. What is the great mass of humanity supposed to do once automatons can do all our jobs? “What is the price of technological progress?” has long been a thematic question at the heart of sci-fi, and I have always enjoyed considering this question.

I also liked quite a few of the insights that Proteus and the other characters gave voice to, though not all of them are easily quotable. Here are a few:

“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”

Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center... Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”

— pg. 84

“Well, you know, in a way I wish I hadn’t met you two. It’s much more convenient to think of the opposition as a nice homogeneous, dead-wrong mass. Now I’ve got to muddy my thinking with exceptions.”

— pg. 89

“Maybe that’s good for a little snicker, maybe, and God knows the world can use a few snickers, but I don’t think it’s right to hurt somebody to give somebody else a snicker. I mean that it all kind of cancels out, and nobody’s ahead... But seems like nobody ever thinks about what’s maybe sacred to somebody, anymore.”

— pg. 203-4

That last one seems far ahead of its time. The next was an exchange between husband and wife, just as they are splitting.

“For richer, for poorer, in sickness as in health... Remember that, Anita? Do you remember?”

“You’re still rich, and you’re not sick... You’re not sick are you?”

“At heart.”

“You’ll get used to it. I did.”

— pg. 250

 

Conclusion

I’m glad I decided to read another Vonnegut novel after Slaughterhouse-Five. While I did have fun with that book, it was not impressive in any way to me. This one was. This book was much more monumental and insightful, I thought. And much easier to read. And it certainly made me wonder why Slaughterhouse-Five is the one on all the “best novels of all time” lists, when this one isn’t.

 

 

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