I have a confession: Kurt Vonnegut has been a dead key to me ever since I started to read both for pleasure and spiritual succor. I’d pick up a Vonnegut novel or story, start to read armed with the conviction that I was about to find something I had been missing. Then I would get distracted. I wrote him off as a breezy smart aleck.

You do know, don’t you, that I am often wrong, and that I rarely even realize the extent of my error?