I first discovered Vonnegut as a teenager, picking up his paperbacks at the library used book sale and finding that his novels and stories were like nothing I’d ever read before.

Back then, I was taken with the bizarre and fantastical: alien races influencing world events, a narrator “unstuck in time,” graphic and crude line drawings (in a book meant for adults!), ice that covered (and destroyed) the entire world, and so it goes.

But now I think that Mother Night is his best work, and there’s nary a Tralfamadorian in sight.

This is the story of Howard Campbell, Jr., notorious Nazi and war criminal, hoping to prove to an Israeli court that he was actually an American spy during WWII, submitting coded messages undercover, while spewing hateful propaganda.

Vonnegut tells us the moral up front in his introduction; “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Then, he shows us exactly what he means.

There’s plenty of gallows humor to be found here, and plenty of hard truth. Unlike the more famous Slaughterhouse-Five (which describes the horrors of the Dresden firebombing) this book concentrates not on the hell of war, but on the purgatory of its aftermath, and the moral reckoning of its participants, whatever their initial intentions.

Campbell is a more human, more rounded character than many of Vonnegut’s creations, which is why the absurdities and atrocities which pile up in this short novel are that much more powerful.

NOVEL: Mother Night

AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut

YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1961

IMAGE: book cover, the Dial Press