Kurt Vonnegut is the Danny Kaye of American Letters, a world-famous jester whose sweet and zany style has never been sealed by the academy as the high art of a Chaplin or a Keaton, who continues over the years to swoop up devotees without shaking off disdainers. Palm Sunday is not likely to send deserters scrambling from either side….

Palm Sunday is "an autobiographical collage," a literary bag lady—not your run-of-the-street bag lady but a Mary Kathleen O'Looney. In Jailbird, O'Looney turns out to be president of RAMJAC, an international conglomerate that owns everything in the world. According to the copyright, RAMJAC owns Palm Sunday, too. Imagine that. And so on.

Vonnegut's last collage, the 1975 Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, wasn't autobiographical. Neither is this one, if readers are looking for Crack-Ups, or Capotean confessions of madder music and stronger wine, or even a chronology of the and-then-I-wrote-and-wed...