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hope. It is an acknowledgment of the distance between ourselves and our appointed happiness.
    At certain moments, it is reason enough to live.
     
    Part Two
If you really want to hurt your parents and you don’t have enough nerve to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.
     
    I t is an odd and disquieting experience to read the undergraduate thesis you wrote eighteen years ago, not unlike finding photographs of yourself dressed up as a member of Flock of Seagulls. (I am not suggesting here that I ever dressed up like a member of Flock of Seagulls; I am merely using what we in the lit business call an analogy. )
    Nonetheless, I cannot proceed any further without some mention of the document. I have read it twice in the past week and am therefore ready to enumerate its major intellectual conclusions:
     
1. Kurt Vonnegut rules.
    2. You should totally read his books.
    3. I will never be an academic.
     

    I WOULD ALSO LIKE to reassure those of you concerned that I may not have used the verb adumbrate frequently enough in my thesis. In fact, I found occasion to use the verb three times in the first thirty pages alone: “More fundamentally, I hope through this investigation to adumbrate Vonnegut’s unorthodox conception of author/text/reader relations.” My thesis is full of sentences like this.
     
     
     
    ONE OF THE FUNNEST things about rereading the thesis is tallying up all the critics and authors I pretended to have read, but hadn’t. A partial list would include James Joyce, Stendhal, Cervantes, Twain, Leslie Fiedler, Ortega y Gasset, 1 Northrop Frye, Rubin, 2 and Wayne Booth. 3
    Whom, then, did I read?
    I read Vonnegut. I read his novels. I read his stories. I read his essays. I read his interviews. I read his commencement speeches. Had his shopping lists been made available, I would have read those. I also quoted him at length. Approximately one-third of the thesis word count is Vonnegut. I did this mostly because I was, and remain, stupendously lazy. But it is also true (as I shrewdly noted back then) that Vonnegut has not attracted much formal criticism. The foremost commentator on Vonnegut is Vonnegut himself.
     
     
     
    MY THESIS WAS not a total wash. It was merely a partial wash. But it also had what I believe the Chief Curator has referred to as “a certain plucky undergraduate charm.”
    I was interested in the ways Vonnegut makes himself known in his fiction—writing prefaces to his novels, introducing himself as a character—and how these interventions affected what I called, rather grandly, “the fictional contract.”
    My best crack at a summary of the thesis ran like so:
     
Many novelists and critics take as their credo the following sentence from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
    “The artist, like the God of Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
    My thesis might be thought of as an attempt to explore what happens when a writer steps forward and, in full view of the audience, bites his nails frantically.
     
    I do not remember having read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and have grave doubts as to whether I ever did, but I do remember taking extraordinary pride in having come up with this last bit.
    The thesis also included a term of my very own invention: realismo. 4 Realismo, as I defined it, entailed “both the reality claims made by the author and their acceptance by the reader.” I am sorry to inform you that this quite obviously brilliant formulation has not, as yet, found its place within the parlance of the lit crit crowd.
    As if I even care.
     
     
     
    AND WHILE WE’RE bashing those dweebs, let me mention, as a significant furthermore, that people read mostly for emotional reasons, not ideas. They seek a chance to experience the feelings inside themselves—lust, shame, agony—for which daily life offers no outlet. The more