Fossils Galapagos

By R.Z. Sheppard

RV

Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 satire about automation and the working stiff, was premature. Cat's Cradle (1963), an end-of-the-world scenario, fared better in the wake of Khrushchev's shoe banging and the Cuban missile crisis. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was, in the expression of the day, right on. The novel was based on the author's experience as an American POW in Dresden when Allied bombers killed 135,000 civilians. This reminder of total war coincided with the mayhem of Viet Nam, and Vonnegut the cult writer became a popular voice of generalized disenchantment. His refrain "So it goes" and Olympian reprimands like "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind" became convenient responses to a world that seemed out of control.

Galapagos puts Vonnegut one more safe step beyond the complexities of good and evil. The narrator is an amiable phantom named Leon Trout, son of Kilgore Trout of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions. Leon speaks to us from the future, 1 million years after humanity is supposed to have $ extinguished itself. Among the survivors are a handful of tourists and Ecuadorian Indians on Santa Rosalia, an island in the Galapagos. It was there, in 1835, that Charles Darwin observed the variety of species that inspired his theories of natural selection. But according to Vonnegut, nature goofed: Homo sapiens' highly developed cerebral lobes were responsible for the world's troubles. Thinking generated opinions, rationalizations and a peculiar sense of pleasure from cruelty. Says Leon the friendly ghost: "This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains."

What follows is the shady proposition that less gray matter means more happiness--or at least less unhappiness. Given a million years on a remote island, nature turns humans into seal-like creatures of limited intellect. Flippers and sleek skulls enable them to swim after fish. There is no overpopulation because the earth's pre-eminent consumer is now an intermediate delicacy in the food chain, lunch for sharks and killer whales.

Or so we are told. Vonnegut's retrograde evolution is a cute idea but a literary dead end. Leon allows only a misty glimpse of the sweet by-and-by. The future is not dramatized because the elements of drama no longer exist. Instead, the narrator tells us about 1986, the year humanity took its first step down the evolutionary ladder. The tale is a burlesque that mixes natural history, sitcom humor and the Old Testament. For the Flood there is conflict, economic disaster and pollution; the part of Noah's Ark is played by the Bahia de Darwin, a cruise ship that shuttles tourists from Ecuador to the Galapagos. There are baggy-pants characters including a Midwestern con man, a widowed schoolteacher, a Japanese computer wizard and a German sea captain. All converge for the Nature Cruise of the Century, an event that promises the company of Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, William F. Buckley Jr., Walter Cronkite, Rudolf Nureyev and Paloma Picasso.

They do not show, which is the least of many disappointments. The structure of the novel is like the jumbled contents of an old sock drawer, a repository of mismatched pairs and oddments one cannot part with. A number of incidents and allusions seem to have been tucked in as sly parodies of contemporary writers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fantasy; John Irving's gynecology; and Joseph Heller's ending of Catch-22, where Yossarian is last seen planning an escape to neutral Sweden. There are asterisks next to the names of characters marked for death, quotations from sources as disparate as Anne Frank and Oscar Hammerstein, and arch attempts at levity ("There certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane"). Even the name of Elaine's Restaurant is tossed in like a souvenir matchbook.

The random nature of Galapagos' ingredients can be likened to the way nature gropes blindly toward new forms. But Vonnegut's latest novel is no happy accident; its complacent detachment and sentimental cynicism have been fossilized for years.