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Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's books, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey which is surely a demonstration of its eponymous name. The story centers on sibling and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who symbolize Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who passed on young of tumors almost two decades before the book's publication. Vonnegut dedicated this to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Like their videos and regimens, this novel can be an exercise in non-sequentiality and in the bizarre while using those devices to expose greater and horrible truths. The twins exemplify to Swain a kind of common love; he campaigns for it while soldiers of technologically miniaturized Chinese language are launched upon America. Love and carnage intersect in a novel contrived to incorporate credibility and common observation; critics could sense Vonnegut deliberately flouting narrative constraint or essential in an attempt to destroy the notion of the novel he was writing. Slapstick becomes both product and commentary, event and self-criticism; an early and influential exemplory case of modern "metafiction". Vonnegut's tragic life - like the tragic lives of Laurel, Hardy, Buster Keaten and other exemplars of slapstick comedy - is the true center of the work whose cynicism overlays a trustfulness and sense of damage that are perhaps deeper and truer than expressed in virtually any of Vonnegut's earlier or later works. Slapstick is a specific demonstration of the profound alliance of comedy and tragedy which, when Vonnegut is working close to his true sensibility, become indistinguishable.
