Slapstick

Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! is the eighth novel by Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1976 and described by the author as "the closest I have come to an autobiography." Framed as a memoir, it is written by Wilbur Swain, a hundred-year-old man sitting in the ruins of the Empire State Building after the collapse of civilization on Earth. He is the last president of the United States, a pediatrician, and the younger of a pair of grotesque twins. Wilbur and his twin sister Eliza are born physically abnormal and are shut away from society by their parents, raised in an isolated mansion. They discover that when their bodies touch, they merge into a single intelligence far beyond the ordinary—Wilbur the rational, articulate left brain, Eliza the creative right brain who cannot read or write. Together they conceive a scheme against loneliness: give every citizen a randomly assigned middle name made of a natural object plus a number, so that those sharing a name are cousins and those sharing both name and number are brothers and sisters—an "artificial extended family" turning strangers into kin. Wilbur later runs for president on the slogan "Lonesome No More!" and wins, devoting the federal government's last resources to the program. Meanwhile, gravity runs amok, the Green Death and Albanian flu rage, oil runs dry, and the nation falls into civil war and fragmentation. Told in short chapters punctuated by verbal tics like "Hi ho," the novel sets absurdity, compassion, and jokes side by side, exploring loneliness, family, death, and human self-destruction—what the author called a "grotesque situation comedy."