A Sucker’s Punch

Sucker’s Portfolio is the print version of Kurt Vonnegut’s fifth volume of posthumously published fiction. First serialized in a Kindle edition in the last two months of 2012, it gathers six previously unpublished short stories written in the 1950s but rejected by the weekly family magazines that had been this author’s venue before gaining fame as a novelist in the 1960s. Also included is an uncompleted story with a futuristic setting, the type of work Vonnegut’s agents usually had to place in the less remunerative pulp market. Adding bulk to the volume, and also illustrating the more adept author Kurt Vonnegut would become, is his unpublished essay from 1992, The Last Talisman.

Of the posthumous collections published so far, Sucker’s Portfolio presents the most typical examples of what he was doing in the 1950s—which is to say examples of what he had to change in his repertory of effects to succeed in subsequent decades. At its best, Vonnegut’s fifties fiction takes the structure by which a culture professes to understand itself—such as unwarranted riches being a curse rather than a blessing, or undue cleverness turning back on its practitioner—and twists them in a special way that brings forth an unexpected truth. At its worst, it panders to those structures without asking the questions about presumed beliefs that would characterize such mature work as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The finest of this writer’s fifties work was reprinted in 1968 as Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), while the worst—rejected by the magazines, or his agents, or in some cases never circulated himself—waited until after Vonnegut’s death to be published. Sucker’s Portfolio is the best of the worst.

Earlier volumes in the Vonnegut Estate’s posthumous publication program gathered stories pertinent respectively to war or social manners. This latest collection chooses pieces treating relationships between men and women—husbands and wives, lovers, and brothers and sisters—with an emphasis on how the women remain inscrutable. For a writer gifted with insights into a woman’s character, this subject could have been a gold mine. But even at the peak of his success, Vonnegut would admit that he was better with language and incident than character, and a total failure when it came to realizing women on the page. Once he’d found his voice with a vernacular control of language and incident, character would take care of itself, both female and male. Without that voice, weak characterization stands out like the stereotypification it is. And Sucker’s Portfolio is rife with stereotypes.

Do you want a woman to assert herself? The simple, old-fashioned way is to make her a tough type, hard as nails and with a male name such as Marty or Jackie. That happens here in “Rome” and “Sucker’s Punch,” where one woman is a hash-house waitress (with a broken nose), the other a hat-check girl (who works a prostitution scam with her boyfriend). Is there an alternative? In “Rome” it’s an innocent young thing named Melody portrayed as an airhead, while in “Miss Snow, You’re Fired” the woman is an object of beauty, no more and no less, and is fired because her boss cannot perceive anything else. Some narrative dynamics exist in Paris, France, where three couples at distinct stages of life ponder their relationships. The middle-aged pair even generate some comic insight on the author’s part, to the effect that their otherwise jaded co-existence is made easier when there’s money to spend or couples much older than themselves for invidious comparison. But only rarely do incidents in Sucker’s Portfolio support such comic stretches. Too often points made rest on entirely typical evidence.

At his best, Kurt Vonnegut could seize the typical and use it for something entirely new. The volume’s first story, “Between Timid and Timbuktu,” has enough affinities with material in the Vonnegut canon to make it a significant piece of early work. The...