AND SO IT GOES: KURT VONNEGUT: A LIFE

By Charles J. Shields

Henry Holt/Raincoast Books, 528 pp., $30

Toward the end of his biography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Charles J. Shields describes Palm Sunday, the late novelist's collection of essays and short autobiographical pieces.

"Without the veil of fiction," Shields writes, "[Vonnegut] comes across as a pretty cheerless soul, who wrote matter-of-factly about himself, his family and his relatives - nothing like the foxy persona promulgated by his novels."

Ironically, the same could be said of Shields's biography, And So It Goes.

Vonnegut remains a mythic figure. Some call him a modern-day Mark Twain who combined satire, science fiction and autobiography to critique war and other human atrocities. Some have described him as a '60s counter-cultural icon, whose work resonated with hippies and college radicals then and now. Others herald him as a literary pioneer of post-modern metafiction along with Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon. Most agree, however, that he is one of the top American literary humorists of all time.

In clips of his lectures and television interviews, Vonnegut cuts a roguish figure, with his tall, gangly frame and his mane of wild, bushy hair. He was prone to sarcasm, smoked fiendishly and laughed easily. So, one might assume a biography on such a larger-than-life character would live up to the promise of a larger than-life story.

That doesn't happen. Unfortunately for Shields, his subject died a month after agreeing to work with him. Without Vonnegut's collaboration, Shields relies on quotidian details in the life of an often-bored, isolated and insecure man. Vonnegut drank too much, spent too much time writing in his study and not enough time with his kids. He drove his wives, girlfriends and the occasional mistress crazy.

All of which is hardly surprising territory. And, unfortunately, the biography is neither salacious nor intellectually absorbing. A great portrait of an artist must achieve one or the other. Authors like Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath or Hunter S. Thompson led dramatic lives full of adventure, madness - or a bit of both.

In the absence of that kind of compelling personal narrative, a strong biography offers insights into the inspiration behind the artist's great works.

Vonnegut's life has its moments of high drama: growing up in the shadow of an overbearing genius brother, having parents whose fortunes changed drastically during the Great Depression, dealing with his mother's suicide. But the insular Vonnegut didn't react strongly to these incidents. It was only in his fiction that these stories came alive.

Take, for example, the section on Vonnegut's service during the Second World War. Shields gives us the account of the writer being captured by Nazis and spending time in a POW camp in Dresden. The situation is compelling, but the effect of reading Shields's prose is like reading war recollections of any soldier.

In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, widely regarded as his masterpiece, however, the novelist describes the same autobiographical event, but it is transformed through his talent. His unique brilliance lies in being able to serve up such harrowing moments from his life with a masterful mix of the fantastic and the absurd. And so, in that novel, we have the protagonist "unstuck in time," moving backward and forward from the POW camp to a zoo on a faraway planet. As Vonnegut says in the preface, "all this happened, more or less."

One of the best parts of Shields's biography turns out to be its introduction, in which he tells us how he got the job of being Vonnegut's biographer. He wrote to the author back in the summer of 2006.

A droll exchange between the two men occurred, with Vonnegut finally relenting and sending Shields a postcard with the word "OK," with a selfportrait drawn on the back. The two met once, at Vonnegut's house, and hit it off.

Then, hours after Shields left, energized by the feeling that things were off to a great start, Vonnegut fell down the stairs and had to be hospitalized. The writer fell into a coma, and, a month later, he died.

"Writing this book has been like conversing with an empty chair," Shields writes in the opening pages.

It is a strange, sad but oddly thrilling story, worthy of Vonnegut's fiction, and it works better than anything else in the biography because it is has the most vital thing about the author's life and his work: Vonnegut's voice.

A daring author like Kurt Vonnegut needs a daring voice to tell his story. While Shields's book is a valuable resource, I found myself thinking about Kilgore Trout, the hack sci-fi writer and Vonnegut alter-ego who appears in much of his fiction. What kind of biography would he have written?