Appreciation: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Listen: Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.

The beloved American satirist died yesterday in New York at age 84 after decades of disgruntled amusement at his longevity. He was an enthusiastic smoker, a veteran of at least one suicide attempt, and the survivor--in a stroke of irony that only he could have penned--of severe smoke inhalation after his home caught fire in 2000.

Vonnegut is most famous for Slaughterhouse-Five, his careening novel about a World War II veteran, Billy Pilgrim, who (like Vonnegut himself) witnessed the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden. The book, in which Pilgrim has become "unstuck in time," abruptly teleporting from one episode of his life to another, came to embody the ethos of Vonnegut's work, in which tragedy slips seamlessly into absurdity and, in the deranged world it leaves behind, grief is some funny stuff.

That was 1969. Vonnegut had finished the short novel the previous year, during one of the most volatile stretches in American history, and there is no question that people saw his book then as a commentary on the present.

But Vonnegut wrote for an age, not an Age. His fans often describe reading him voraciously during a short stretch in their life, often in their mid- or late teens, and then moving on. His cocktail of irreverence and compassion was dressed up in a sense of morality. His books guided generations of readers out of their social angst into ... well, at least moral angst, which is much easier to live with.

When Vonnegut appeared on the Daily Show in September 2005, host Jon Stewart gave him this simple and telling introduction: "As an adolescent, he made my life bearable."

Novelist John Casey, who won the National Book Award in 1989 for Spartina (Amazon.com), studied with Vonnegut in the late 1960s at the University of Iowa, just as he was shedding his cult appeal for a wider American audience with the publication of Slaughterhouse (Amazon.com), his sixth novel.

"He became famous before our very eyes at Iowa," says Casey, who now teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

Vonnegut's abrasive side could get the better of him, Casey said, but the insults were worth it for the sincerity of the apologies.

"He was very insistent that everyone be kind to each other, but he would occasionally blurt out things," says Casey, who had seen Vonnegut often over the past few years. When he and his first wife, fellow student Jane Barnes, told Vonnegut they were getting married, he blurted (as Casey recalls it): "Getting married? What makes you think that you two can be faithful to each other?"

Vonnegut called the next day.

"Oh, my God, I'm so sorry; I should be thrilled. I feel like that old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers song, 'The Continental.' " (Supposedly, two thirds of the people who danced to the song got married.)

It's hard not to see a lot of the same dichotomies in his books and his character, but at the end of the day, Casey says, he was a teacher who wanted his students to break the same barriers he had:

"He was a wonderful teacher. He wanted everyone to be experimenting."

--Chris Wilson