I found Vonnegut’s last book, A Man Without a Country, in a bargain bin recently: it’s a collection of essays published in 2005, well after he had declared that he had already written his last book. As expected, it is smart, funny, and cranky; it pulls no punches, and concerns itself with the 'Big Things' in life, like what makes it worth living and how people and the government screw things up and how we’re all killing the planet. It is also much too short: you could read it in less time than it takes to get from Quezon City to Makati during morning rush hour, which was when I read it. The back-cover blurb says that this book consists of Vonnegut’s thoughts on life, art, sex, politics, and the state of America’s soul. That’s one way of putting it. Another way is this: A Man Without a Country is about the many things that are wrong in this world, and the precious few that are right.

Those who have read a good chunk of Vonnegut’s earlier writings will find much that is familiar here: the ideas, of course, the tone and basic attitude, but also some anecdotes, and certain real-life characters, relatives and friends and such. Which is not to say that he’s merely repeating himself; on the whole, his writing here feels both more general and more direct than ever before. He names names and throws stones, but the topics tackled are arranged less neatly and specifically than in his previous nonfiction work. This is a book written by a man at the end of his patience who has no time to weave elaborate metaphors or use fables, but who has not lost the capacity to care, and perhaps hope, and, of course, joke. And the most I can give you to cling to is a poor thing, actually, he says by way of introducing a true-life tale. Not much better than nothing, and maybe it’s a little worse than nothing.

Elsewhere, Vonnegut writes: "Only nutcases want to be president." This was true even in high school. One reads his scathing attacks on the previous American administration with appreciation, agreement and the knowledge that this was written well before said administration brought about their country’s recent financial calamity. Then again, predicting disaster under Dubya was not exactly the work of a Nostradamus; all it required was some observation. George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, a.k.a. Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences. One wonders what Vonnegut would make of this time of supposedly renewed hope under Obama. It’s honestly hard to say; overt cynicism tempered with a bruised and secret optimism seems a good guess.

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too, Vonnegut writes in another chapter: "Life is no way to treat an animal."- And yet as much as he rants about the people in charge (the guessers, as he puts it) and the sorry state of the world we live in, he also offers us some refuge, in the form of a simple account of a trip to the post office: the pleasure of chatting with strangers, of buying an envelope and slipping a letter into a big blue bullfrog of a mailbox. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.

Vonnegut’s best, most enduring work remains his fiction, Mother Night and Bluebeard, in my opinion but even judged against the standards of his nonfiction, this book is less substantial than Wampeters, Foma and Granfallons, say, or even Fates Worse Than Death. But A Man Without a Country is refreshing because it reads like Vonnegut unfiltered. In that sense it is both his least essential and most honest work.