[The] novel must cease taking itself seriously or perish…. Vonnegut has had what we now realize to be an advantage in this regard, since he began as a Pop writer, the author of "slick" fiction, written to earn money, which is to say, to fit formulas which are often genuine myths, frozen and waiting to be released. Fortunately, though he has sometimes written to suit the tastes of the middle-aged ladies who constitute the readership of the Ladies' Home Journal, he has tended more to exploit the mythology of the future. But he has, in any case—as writers of, rather than about, mythology must—written books that are thin and wide, rather than deep and narrow, books which open out into fantasy and magic by means of linear narration rather than deep analysis; and so happen on wisdom, fall into it through grace, rather than pursue it doggedly or seek to earn it by hard work. Moreover, like all literature which tries to close the gap between the elite and the popular audiences rather than to confirm it, Vonnegut's books tend to temper irony with sentimentality and to dissolve both in wonder….
Vonnegut does belong to what we know again to be the mainstream of fiction; it is not the mainstream of High Art, however, but of myth and entertainment: a stream which was forced to flow underground over the past several decades, but has now surfaced once more. (p. 196)
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