Early on, Broer says 'Vonnegut gives specific names to the numerous forms of mental collapse that overtake his characters -- "combat fatigue," "demonic depression," "echolalia," "sexual mania," "masochism," "catalepsis," "samaritrophia," "dementia praecox," "catatonia," and "Hunter Thompson Disease."' (page 3, he places the commas inside the quotation marks). But what sort of list is it? At least two of the terms ('samaritrophia' and 'Hunter Thompson Disease') are Vonnegut's coinages, and others have been replaced in the medical vocabulary (Kraepelin's 'dementia praecox' by 'schizophrenia'), 'combat fatigue' has probably been subsumed into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, while the key word, 'schizophrenia' does not appear in his list, as if Vonnegut has not used it at all. Even so, in the note he appends to a reference to Samuel Becket he gives the scientific references for his understanding of 'Vonnegut's generic schizoid or schizophrenic hero' (page 197). And so, from page 3 to the end of the text on page 195, that's just about the last we read of medicine or science. This is a literary study and a close reading of the text, looking for references to split, dual and dulled personalities. Vonnegut's scientific background, or even the relationship of his work to the SF genre (he uses it, if only to reject it, or to reject some of it like the hack work of Kilgore Trout), receives almost no attention, and when Broer uses the denigratory term 'sci-fi' (eg on page 212), this omission appears to be intentional. Even the possibilities of science and medicines as a treatment or meliorative at the current time for psychic pain fail to get a mention, let alone the exploration of future cures possible in SF.

Broer's thesis is straightjacketed, and one see this in his choice to base the book on Patricia Waugh's Metafiction. First published in 1984 in Methuen's New Accents series, it is one of a series in which each volume gives a short, comprehensive overview of recent developments in literary theory. Each is aimed at the general reader, though I'd guess most are bought by undergraduates. In her book Waugh discusses Vonnegut, probably for three reasons: he is one of the best- selling (and therefore most easily available) authors who uses metafiction; he works on the edges of a specific popular genre (SF), and thirdly, he is unpretentious about it. He has seven references in the index of her book (and Broer probably quotes them all). But another one of the New Accents series refers to Vonnegut just as much: Patrick Parrinder's 1980 Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, especially in a section headed 'Intertextuality and Parody', yet Broer does not mention the book at all.

Think of some oppositions: play versus mental illness; economic oppression versus SF; Literature (with a capital 'L') versus trashy paperbacks; privilege versus exclusion. Vonnegut's work offers all these subjects for discussion, and Broer manages to sideline them all. In fact, Broer tends to avoid anything in which Vonnegut brings them up. Take Charles Platt's interview with Vonnegut in Who Writes Science Fiction (aka Dreammakers). Vonnegut makes some very straightforward statements about everything from SF to the function of the American economy, and then in discussing his war experiences in Dresden, he says 'There was nothing I could do except endure, and try to integrate this sort of catastrophe into my understanding of life ... The human spirit must somehow be prepared to survive enormous catastrophes like this, and not hold ourselves responsible for it'. This seems a clear enough statement rejecting schizophrenia as a response to what is happening, but it is also inimicable to Broer's argument, and he quotes nothing like it.

In a sense I have criticised Broer for a book he did not write. I am, though, still puzzled why he wrote one so restricted as this.