Review: Vonnegut, off to a fast start
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 27, 2012
"Basic Training" is a piece of Americana, a coming-of-age post WWII domestic short story about finding your place in the world that might have been published in "Boys Life" or more likely "The Saturday Evening Post," where it might have been illustrated with a Normal Rockwell tableau representing American ideals and moreover hope.Hope is one of the main characters. She becomes the object of desire of the kid, the archetype, Haley Brandon, an adolescent naf with smarts, sincerity and a great stash of innocence who wants to play the piano but ends up - as children often do in this genre - an orphan, toiling dawn to dusk on his uncle's farm outside Chicago.Hope Cooley, her sisters Kitty and Anne and now Haley make up a Midwestern farm family subjected to the iron will of retired Brigadier General William Cooley, "The General," a tyrant with a cold, cold heart who presides over his family as he led his soldiers, with rules and discipline.Although the General "tries to solve everything buy saying no," Vonnegut also gives the overbearing head of the family a molecule or two of compassion, and it's discovering this deeply buried bit of empathy that gives the story much of its resonance.Haley owns the tale and he's our prism for viewing the American nearing the half-century mark, a place that more often than not tends to be no more dangerous "than mice in a corncrib."There's a hint of Holden Caulfield, Augie March and Huck Finn in the kid, and you get the clear sense the heartland that Haley is growing up in will have room to accommodate his expansive sense of hope and optimism.The tale is funny, sad, endearing and satiric. It's everything Vonnegut except the science fiction. It's also violent but the violence is delivered in a way that's antiseptic so that when someone ends up with a knife sticking out his chest, there is no blood or gore to mess things up.Part of a trove of unpublished material, "Basic Training" is an early work, an introduction to a career that shined for a half century. It's Vonnegut off to a great start.