Book Review: Cat's Cradle (Part I: Story & Review)

Kurt Vonnegut
1963
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This week’s post contains a synopsis of the plot of Cat’s Cradle and a short review of the book. In my next post I’ll talk a bit about Vonnegut’s style and recurring themes in his work.

As authors go, Kurt Vonnegut is one of my all-time favorites. His writing is witty, dark, cynical, honest, and courageously personal. He used his books to express his feelings about the heavy issues that preoccupied him—war, religion, and the general futility of human endeavor—and he did it with narratives that are completely depressing and totally hilarious at the same time.

As with many of Vonnegut’s novels, many of the character details in Cat’s Cradle are autobiographical. The main character and narrator, John, is a writer (like Vonnegut) originally from Indiana (as was Vonnegut) who attended Cornell (as did Vonnegut). John is a little bit obsessed with World War II (as was Vonnegut). He wants to write a book about what important Americans were doing the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

One of these important Americans is Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the bomb. John writes letters to Hoenikker’s three children, who all turn out to be very quirky people. The daughter, Angela, is a six-foot-tall extreme social introvert married to a former lab assistant of her father’s who now works in a secret government factory. The oldest son, Frank, has somehow become second in command to “Papa” Monzano, the dictator of an isolated, infertile, poverty-stricken island in the Caribbean called the Republic of San Lorenzo. And the youngest son, Newton, is a four-foot-tall layabout who dropped out from Cornell before graduating (as did Vonnegut). “Newt” is the only one of the three who writes John back, and he provides juicy information about not only his father but also his two siblings.

Meanwhile, through other lines of research, John learns from Hoenikker’s former supervisor that one of the non-bomb-related projects Hoenikker had been working on was a substance called ice-nine, which was designed to make liquids freeze at temperatures up to 130° F. The motive behind developing ice-nine was so that Marines would no longer have to slog through mud; when they encountered a section of mud they would otherwise have had to slog through, they could drop the ice-nine into it and the entire mud puddle would become solid.

The supervisor was using ice-nine as an example of the way Hoenikker worked, single-mindedly obsessing about projects even when they were physically impossible. Or so he thought. He didn’t realize that Hoenikker had actually succeeded in creating ice-nine, and that each of Hoenikker’s children had a thermos of it.

Ice-nine works by teaching other water molecules that are touching it how to freeze in a different way, at a higher temperature than normal ice. Once the molecules next to the original piece of ice-nine are frozen, they in turn teach the molecules next to them how to freeze at that higher temperature as well. The problem is that the chain reaction is unstoppable. If someone were to drop a piece of ice-nine into any body of water, anywhere, it would make that water freeze… and any streams or rivers next to that water would freeze… and any bodies of water touching those streams or rivers would freeze… and so on until every bit of water on earth was frozen.

In other words, it’s a bad idea to use it. Which is why the Hoenikker children keep it secret, locked in their thermoses, and bring the thermoses with them where ever they go.

Anyway, in a typically Vonnegutian series of coincidences, John becomes rapidly wrapped up in the Hoenikker family’s adventures, and, eventually, because of the ice-nine in the Hoenikker childrens' thermoses, the fate of all of humanity:

First, John gets assigned to write a newspaper story about a philanthropist who lives on the Republic of San Lorenzo. He ends up on a flight to the island along with the new U.S. ambassador to San Lorenzo and his wife, a bicycle manufacturer and his wife, and Angela and Newton Hoenikker, who are there to attend their brother’s wedding to “Papa” Monzano’s daughter.

John socializes with all of them (sometimes uncomfortably) during the flight, which leads to him being swept up in the ambassador’s entourage, invited to a ceremony at the palace to honor San Lorenzo’s World War II heroes, and eventually offered a job as successor to dictator “Papa” Monzano.
                                
Eventually, too, John learns that the ice-nine isn’t really a secret, and that practically everyone knows about it—including the CIA, the Soviets, and “Papa” Monzano. And, of course, by the end of the novel the ice-nine comes inevitably, ridiculously, horrifyingly, disastrously out of the bag (or thermos).

As a story, Cat’s Cradle is not one of my absolute favorites of Vonnegut’s novels. There are others in which I felt more of a connection to the characters; the people in this book, even including narrator John, are all somewhat aloof. 

But it is still one of his most potent books for me, delivering its anti-war, pro-humanity, we-are-all-fatalistically-doomed messages in the striking, succinct, and funny way that all of his best work does. Cat’s Cradle was also the first of Vonnegut’s books that I ever read, when I was very young. And it made a huge impression on me.

First, the concept of ice-nine was extremely powerful. I couldn’t stop thinking about it: the idea of what would happen if something like that really existed and got into the water system, quickly zipping out like icy tentacles freezing tributaries and rivers and oceans until everything was ice. It's brilliant and terrifying.

Second, and more importantly, I had never yet read anything that had such an irreverent, hysterical take on serious issues like war and religion—and yet still clearly took those issues very, very seriously. It felt more genuine and made its points better than any other more moralistic work I had read covering the same topics. He made me feel like I was laughing maniacally with him as we were falling off the edge of a cliff.