It’s been almost thirty years since I read Player Piano, and all I had retained from that first read was the name of the main character, a faint recollection of the novel’s focus on a future world heavily reliant on automation, and a vague sense of not liking the book all that much despite Vonnegut being one of my favorite authors. I had hoped to like the book better as a seasoned adult, but instead I found re-reading Player Piano to be a tedious chore which surprised me, as this year I have returned to Slaughterhouse-Five, Jailbird and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and enjoyed all of them.I began the year with Vonnegut’s recently published Letters and liked it so much that I wanted to go back and revisit some of these novels I read way back in high school. Alas, Player Piano did not have much to offer me this second time around. The story is set in a not-so-distant dystopian future, a society run by managers and engineers where machines and computers have been perfected and attend to much of life’s needs. Regular folks like you and me (unless you happen to be a manager or an engineer) lead mundane lives outside the enclaves of these giants of industry (in a way Margaret Atwood has created a similar society in her Maddaddam trilogy with her Compounds populated by elite genengineers while the rest of the population lives in the chaotic pleeblands), but their dreary lives have been robbed of satisfaction because machines have taken away most of what they have done in the past to find meaning in their lives.For a dystopian society, the world of Player Piano is a fairly mundane place, with no Thought Police or Hunger Games, but the effect on the everyday citizen is still soul crushing. It’s a little like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit meets the world of Fahrenheit 451, minus a fire department whose job it is to burn books. Interestingly, however, Vonnegut has written his book before either of those two novels. Paul Proteus leads the perfect life. He is head of the Ilium Works, married to a beautiful wife and being groomed to take over Pittsburgh (humorously, in 1952 an author might have seen Pittsburgh as the future locus of industry and technology!). But despite having it all, Proteus feels like something is missing, and it is…his dissatisfaction leads him regularly to visit Homestead, the gritty town on the other side of the river to see how the other half lives, and his pretty little wife just doesn’t understand these longings he has for breaking out of the mold and doing his own thing. Proteus will remind you a bit of Guy Montague, and you’ll probably feel a sense of familiarity with the world of Player Piano. Vonnegut isn’t the first one to explore these themes, and he certainly wasn’t the last, but after having read so many similar books and watched numerous episodes of The Twilight Zone about similar characters searching for a way out of the grey flannel rat race, it all feels rather dreary and dull, even if Vonnegut is doing it so much earlier than many of these other authors.And therein lies perhaps the best reason to continue reading this book, even if it isn’t one of Vonnegut’s best. If anything, it can be delved into as a sort of artifact and a pretty interesting one at that. It is, after all, Vonnegut’s first novel, published just seven years after he is released from a German POW camp. He’s been to graduate school at the University of Chicago and not done so well there, and then he’s been to work for GE and experienced firsthand its monotonous bureaucracy, and he works all of these threads into the story which introduces many of his themes that he returns to again and again in his later works: the worth of the individual in a society that values conformity, the role of free will versus determinism, an ironic understanding of the absurdity at the core of human life, a concern with progress that fails to take into account the needs of the people it is supposed to be serving, and a tremendous love of humanity tempered by the sure understanding that we human beings are hella stoopid.But what’s missing from Player Piano is that Vonnegut voice and style that readers have come to expect from him. Here, in his first novel, he goes for plodding linear narrative, third person narration, and pedestrian character development, three techniques that he abandons over the next ten years. There is plenty of black humor at work here, but he has yet to embrace his pared-down style, the digressive randomness and the bleak whimsy that begin to appear in his next Sirens of Titan and which he has mastered ten years later in Cat’s Cradle. Nonetheless, the reader can see a hint of what is to come in later books, especially in the subplot weaving its way through the novel with the comic figure of the Shah of Bratpuhr who is taking a tour of the United States accompanied by a State Department handler. He visits Ilium, takes a tour of a planned community, meets the president, and visits the Carlsbad Caverns to view the massive supercomputer, EPICAC XIV. The Shah, drinking heavily from his flask of sacred liquor of Sumklish, is curious about all the sights of America, but calls EPICAC a false god when it can’t provide the answer to his riddle, and, to his handler’s consternation, keeps referring to the common Americans he meets on his journey, as Takaru, slaves…No, his handler tells him, “No Takaru…Ci-ti-zen.”“Ahhhhh,” said the Shah. “Ci-ti-zen.” He grinned happily. “Takaru—citizen. Citizen—Takaru.”And lines like that one right there are proof of why, even if this book is a bit of a drag to read, Vonnegut is such a great writer, and why even his weaker books should be read again and again and again.Here's my review for Slaughterhouse-Five:http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...and Jailbird:http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
I read a bunch of Vonnegut's stuff in late high school and college (15-20 years ago) and remember really enjoying him. I didn't recall if I had read this one or not (and now after reading it am sure I did not) before and figured either way he is probably worth a re-visiting in an effort to update these reviews. This one (which I have discovered to be Vonnegut's first and was published in 1952, 5 years before Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged) was engaging and forward thinking social commentary. Certainly supports the idea that I should read (and re-read) more of his stuff.Paul Proteus is a wishy-washy hero, but provides a great vehicle through which Vonnegut can make his comments and predictions of the future mechanization of American society. Certainly 60 years after its publication, I have the benefit of the unfolding of history to point out some of Vonnegut's weaknesses: socialization of the mass populace is not necessary, we moderns instead just disenfranchized those who are not willing to provide manual labor and the education of former third world populations has allowed us to outsource cheap intellectual labor rather than create a hierarchy of the intellectual (to which I am not convinced I am opposed..see Atlas Shrugged for a potential Utopian ideal). However, one can imagine how especially in the 50s the events of this novel may not have seemed so far fetched.Over and over he gives us examples of the inefficiency created by the "uber-efficiency" of the machines: well qualified men being given the axe (Bud and Halyard) simply because they do not meet some ridiculous criteria. The well oiled machine of American society has been bureaucratized to such an extent that they are no longer making the best decisions on a global scale.Vonnegut's plot is thin and the use of Halyard's tour with the Shah simply a vehicle for conversations with "interesting" other member of the population (barbers, Edgar Hagstrohm..average man, and college football coaches and players) as well as examination of the system by an outsider. I found the Shah's insistence on calling the averageman a Takaru (slave) and Halyard's original refutation of this term followed by his eventual agreement to be entertaining.Of course Vonnegut is not attempting to really draft a compelling story; the whole thing is a ruse for social commentary. And so, there are quite a few conveniences and mishaps along the way. I have a few funny/apt quotes below:"It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to.""'I'm going to get myself a uniform, so I'll know what I think and stand for.' 'Or two--like Luke Lubbock'""IQ isn't everything. Some of the unhappiest people in this world are the smartest ones.""Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful."
What do You think about Player Piano (1999)?
Vonnegut establishes himself as a satirical juggernaut in his first novel, and true to the jacket, his commentary is extremely close to reality. Though more grounded in the technological reality it was written in than say Huxley or Orwell (all technological apparatuses operate based on tapes and recorders), Vonnegut's vision of the future is no less haunting and truly uncanny. The satire offered by the "Shah" is harsh, poignant, and altogether hilarious--this novel is everything that the "black comedian" would go on to be in novels like Slaughterhouse-five. This novel, though, is more entrenched in narrative style; where in Slaughterhouse the medium is in many ways the message, Player Piano offers a clear message through the haunting narrative and its (personally) frustrating conclusion. As stated before, the book emanates an uncanny ambiance--despite the seemingly "plain" events and the "average" life that occupy the bulk of the text, there always to be something resting beneath the surface... 5/5
—Mike Gyssels
I can't really explain why I didn't like this one more than I did. I did some vigorous head-nodding with the message, and it's an at-least-decent showing for a first novel, and there are moments that seem downright prescient for something written 60 years ago. So why did I keep nodding off in the middle of it? Why did I entertain thoughts of abandoning it? It's a 2-star book with several 4-star moments, but not enough to average out to 3-stars. Not for me. Were my expectations too high? Was I spoiled by Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions?See also:• http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.c...
—Rob
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut was his first novel, first published in 1952. Early fiction from Vonnegut is told in a more straightforward fashion than Vonnegut readers will be accustomed to from his later works, but his imagination and wit are still unmistakable. This is a dystopian work describing a United States after a third war where machines have taken the place of 90% of industrial workers. Government work available to displaced workers comes from either the Army, emasculated and bureaucratic, or the reconstitution and reclamation corps, the Reeks and the Wrecks, a civil organization where workers have military-esque occupational titles such as asphalt layer first class and senior street sweeper. Funny and thought provoking this ushered in a long and prolific career for Vonnegut.
—Lyn
