God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A Novel
by Kurt Vonnegut
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kurt VonnegutEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-09-08
ISBN: 0385333471
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Book Reviews of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A Novel
Book Review: "Money is a dehydrated Utopia"
Summary: 5 Stars
God Bless you Mr. Rosewater is a challenge to fight for social justice and to support the humanist motto if "God da-n it, you've got to be kind." In his classic opening sentence, Vonnegut says "A sum of money is a leading character in this tale about people, just as a sum of honey might properly be a leading character in a story about bees." Vonnegut uses skittish plots and a variety of curious characters to lay out a picture of America that is becoming more stratified by money and access to power. As the main character, the ill-begotten fortune is given a birth (original accumulation by Noah Rosewater who sent a substitute to the civil war, allowing him to stay home and make millions in the war effort) and a death (Eliot's surprise decision at the end).
Pisquontuit, Rhode Island and Rosewater County, Indiana are the principle settings for the book and both are everyday small towns comprised of wealth and poverty. Vonnegut describes the inhabitants of each as "The lives led there were nearly all paltry, lacking in subtlety, wisdom, wit or convention - were precisely as pointless and unhappy as lives led in Rosewater, Indiana." The stratification of wealth is most poignantly illustrated in his depiction of Pisquontuit, where Fred Rosewater intermittently enters the drugstore that has the coffee shop for the rich, then the news store that has the coffee shop for the poor.
Although America's rich have devised laws to propagate their wealth untouched through the generations, you can still gain access to the "money river" by becoming a "slurper." Norman Mushari, young lawyer, learned in law school that, "just like a good airline pilot should always be looking for places to land, so should a lawyer always be looking for situations were large amounts of money were about to change hands." Hence comes the plot line. Eliot Rosewater is the heir to the $87,472,033.61 Rosewater fortune. To make sure he gets his dibs, Mushari wants to prove that Eliot is insane thereby redirecting the money river to a distant cousin, Fred Rosewater, in Pisquontuit.
Besides Elliot Rosewater and Fred Rosewater, the third important Rosewater is Senator Lister Ames Rosewater. Clearly, he personifies the idea proposed by the subtitle "pearls before swine." Similar to Ebenezer Scrooge prior to his visits from Christmas ghosts, Senator Rosewater represents the attitude of the aristocratic rich that social programs and wealth reallocation initiatives are frivolous because we should not waste good things on people who will not appreciate them.
In usual Vonnegut style, the reader is clearly and repeatedly presented the theme of the book in no uncertain terms. Early in the book, he writes "When the United States of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated a folly of the founding fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors hadn't made it a law in the utopia that wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who love expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone."
Again, later in the book, Kilgore Trout has this to say in reference to Eliot's apparent capricious financial support of his neighbors' needs: "Well... what you did in Rosewater County was far from insane. It was quite easily the most important social experiment of our time, for it dealt on a very small scale with the problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: how to love people who have no use?"
Summary of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A Novel
Eliot Rosewater?drunk, volunteer fireman, and President of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation?is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature . . . with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is Kurt Vonnegut?s funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.
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