Whether you considered him a latter-day literary sage in the Mark Twain mold or a faded ’60s fixture unwilling (or unable) to abandon that era’s penchant for oversimplification and cloying verbal trickery, Kurt Vonnegut, who died last week, represented a unique generational bridge. A World War II vet whose horrific experiences as a POW in Germany provided fodder for his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Vonnegut—a Hoosier—was as well-versed in plainspoken pre-boomer hucksterism as he was in the counterculture’s spacy patois. This tightrope act informed his best books, including Mother Night (1961) and freshman-lit mainstay Cat’s Cradle (1963), and hobbled his lesser ones (the loopy cornpone of 1973’s Breakfast of Champions is practically unreadable), in which he was given to refurbishing characters and plots and drawing pictures of his butthole. But while he may have run out of things to say, or fresh ways of saying old things, his dedication to “calling attention to things that really matter” never faltered. A late book of previously published musings, A Man Without a Country (2005), elicited polite reviews, and at some level Vonnegut himself must have appreciated how his lifelong advice to be suspicious of our elders came home to roost.