Review - Like Shaking Hands with God by Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer

Like Shaking Hands with God: a conversation about writing with Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer
Publisher: Washington Square Press 2000
Paperback 80 pages



If you know anything about me, you will know that when it comes to Kurt Vonnegut I am, well, a little obsessive. He is the first author that I ever fell in love with, and his writing has changed my life in more ways than I can ever recount. I can say that I have read everything, and I mean everything, that the man has published, and many articles and letters that you can only find by scouring the internet and magazine publications. One thing that I have never done, was to read anything by people who are giving a critique on the work of Vonnegut, because, well... I frankly don't care what the know-it-all types think of his work. But lately I have discovered that by overlooking the books about Kurt Vonnegut I was missing this little jewel of a book. This book is a actually a conversation that took place at a bookstore. At the time Kurt Vonnegut had just released Timequake and Lee Stringer had released his first novel Grand Central Winter. They took time to answer questions about their books, life and the writing process. What came of that conversation, and an additional informal talk between the two, is what this book encompasses.


Instead of giving a summarization of this work, let me share with you a passage that really spoke to me:

"I have taught creative writing during my seventy-thre​e years on automatic pilot, rerun or not. I did it first at the University of Iowa in 1965. After that came Harvard, and then the City College of New York. I don't do it anymore.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternativel​y, they should run really nice whorehouses,​ come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements​ in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before.

In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be-ink​-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies​ from manic-depres​sive experts on what most people want.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I fell and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."​