The Sirens of Titan achieves an incredible complexity that probably only a style like Vonnegut's is capable of--a complexity that goes far beyond such intricate plots as Dickens' Great Expectations. Vonnegut's hero, Malachi Constant, moves through three sets of circumstances, three whole identies so remote from each other that he goes by three different names.

Yet throughout the book we are constantly aware of the whole, the governing force that determines all the happenings of the story, the answer to the suggestion Malachi Constant makes to explain his own good luck--"I guess somebody up there likes me."

Vonnegut not only explains the reason for one individual's undeserved good luck (really he gives us a philosophy to deal with excessively lucky people), but he also lets us find answers to such questions as what is the purpose of an individual in his own life, what is the meaning of the civilization of mankind, and what the progress of civilization is.

Now, we don't necessarily have to accept the naked answers Vonnegut gives us to our unasked questions. For example, the meaning of the civilization of mankind is five sentences; those five sentences don't describe the meaning--they are the meaning of civilization. But if we accept Vonnegut's world to work with, it gives us something all put together so we can see how everything relates to each other.

Though the plot is infinitely complex, the events are not merely strung out in a loose chain. The plot is always alluding back to patterns it followed earlier, answering questions it asked earlier, and suddenly giving vital purpose to what earlier seemed to be pages of merely pleasant digression.

The great achievement of The Sirens of Titan is to present us with a complexity, such as literature has never before offered us, that comes close to representing what we, at least in this century, understand to be the complexity of our own lives.

We get the feeling after reading any of Kurt Vonnegut's novels (excepting, perhaps, the first, Player Piano) that at least we now know what the situation is, that any explanation of cause and effect just ignores several levels of complexity and will be soon invalidated.

VONNEGUT also shows something about why it is that we think something is funny, why we can be happy and just glad. Vonnegut's books are very funny, easily the funniest things in print. Some people I know, mostly grown-ups, say that his books are almost exclusively funny. These grown-ups also like to give little names to what Vonnegut writes like "Black Humor," a phrase which is necessarily irrelevant if it is defined in terms of other people's writings.

We find often when we are laughing in Vonnegut's books that we are laughing because what he points out is true. The truth, because it really exists, is funny. When Malachi Constant's father found he couldn't buy the Mona Lisa, he debased her by using her in an advertising campaign for suppositories; the whole idea is funny because we know it could happen, and it's true that that is about the way a lot of people alive today think.

So the truth makes us laugh; to be happy is to know that something exists.

I occasionally wonder if Vonnegut's writing will lose its appeal a few ages hence. Certainly life will continue to become even more complex and our minds will want to identify that this is happening to us. But will people drift out of the particular absurdities they now languish in and start speaking in a new idiom different from the one Vonnegut's characters used to speak? And would such an occurrence make the then readers unable to recognize the truth in the writing and hence not laugh? Well, fundamentally I believe that it is the cliches that will never change, that, as our society mechanizes itself into inactivity, will still form the core base of something familiar.

AND NOW to offer an example of Kurt Vonnegut's explanation of human behavior, this is how he explains why Jones in Mother Night could seem perfectly normal and yet lead the insane "Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution":

"I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened to a system of gears whose teeth had been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy, pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

"The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.

"Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth hat are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.