Very odd experience reading my advance copy of this weekend’s NY Times Book Review: First Jane & Michael Stern devote a half-paragraph of their review of Christopher Buckley‘s Boomsday to how it “echoes Kurt Vonnegut‘s ‘Welcome to the Monkey House,'” only not as good. Then, three pages later, Lance Morrow begins a discussion of Deep Economy by Bill McKibben by observing, “Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim (in Slaughterhouse-Five) had a famous dream in which the film of time ran backwards…”
At first, I thought Vonnegut’s death had just put him on all their minds, but then I checked myself: Wouldn’t the long lead time for the Review make that impossible? Sure enough, senior editor Dwight Garner wrote me back, “This weekend’s issue closed on April 11—the day before Vonnegut’s death was announced, so the mentions were entirely coincidental.” And so it goes…