Book Review: Bagombo Snuff Box

(Borrowed from the Mid-Manhattan NYPL on 40th St. and Fifth Ave.) After viewing that documentary on Vonnegut on Hulu, I launched a binge on so-far unread works by the author I've been reading since high school (or maybe junior high, I can't recall.) A plentiful collection of previously uncollected stories from Vonnegut's early days as a writer, eking out a living at a variety of jobs including car salesman and PR wordsmith for General Electric. From the 50s into the early 60s, a number of magazines published short stories by unknowns (Now the New Yorker is one of the few left, and they generally employ known quantities.) Each is a little gem with a twist ending (In an afterward, Vonnegut admits he rewrote three of them for this collection.) Most are humorous satires of human behavior, subdivision small town dreamers. Only two (Thanasphere and 2BR02B) display the dark science-fiction bent of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, and Player Piano. The formula many follow has an objective narrator, either a real-estate man or a financial consultant injected into the bizarre world of absent-minded geniuses, small-time con men and women or obsessive ketchup consultants. My favorites were Any Reasonable Offer (very funny), Runaways (insightful dissection of shallow teenagers and their clueless parents), and Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp (a wallop of a story on clashing values along class and racial lines). Looking forward to the other Vonnegut collections of fiction, essays and letters.