Kurt Vonnegut—public clown, master of disguises, wizard of the ironic approach, self-parodist, sender-up of his self-sending-up—gives the reader of Palm Sunday plenty of warning. Writing, he says, is playing practical jokes on readers: "If you make people laugh or cry about little black marks on sheets of white paper, what is that but a practical joke? All the great story lines are great practical jokes."…

["Somebody thought" is] the sort of response Palm Sunday engagingly invites to its offered collage of bits and pieces. But the presence of irony is a great mongerer of scepticism, especially when it's signalled so loudly….

Vonnegut busily undoes his own book, calling it a blivit ("two pounds of shit in a one pound bag"), mocking it as he mocks the excesses of American authors' immodesties ("This is a very great book by an American genius. I have worked so hard...