Player Piano

Kurt Vonnegut

1952

Dr Paul Proteus was a rising star in Industrial Management, chief executive of the Ilium works. Son of the great George Proteus who had been the nation's first National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director, a position approached in importance only by the presidency of the United States.

Living in the isolated grandeur of the managers' enclave, Paul finds life has lost all real meaning and he's just going through the motions.

His dissatisfaction was brought to a head when his old friend Ed Finnerty suddenly turned up on the Proteus doorstep. Paul and his wife assumed that he had come for the annual Country Club dinner at which Paul was expected to be promoted to manager of the Pittsburgh plant and Anita is horrified to realise that his Washington post would put him socially above the local senior managers. However, he relieves her of her hostessly duties by informing the Proteus household that he'd chucked the Washington job and was just a bum.

He had, he informed Paul, seen the light and come to see that The People in the mass habitats of Homestead really deserved better than to be practically ignored by those in power. Paul, who had always had at least a sneaking suspicion that the vast mass of the population were being unfairly treated, had no problem with Ed's premise. His problem was Ed, for Ed had lost none of his enthusiasm for taking up projects. Trouble was that he took up new enthusiasms more often than he changed his clothes. So Paul is not too surprised by the ease with which Ed was enthralled by an itinerant preacher the pair met in a Homestead saloon. As it got Ed out of his wife's hair, Paul did not really care what Ed was doing.

But Paul can't sink back into his uncaring ennui. Instead he tries to go for an uncaring indifference, buying the least developed farm he could find and trying to get his wife interested in a non-technical lifestyle. This was an unmitigated disaster as Anita reacts in horror.

Then his senior manager approaches Paul and dangles the Pittsburgh job in front of him, only to withhold it unless he informs on Finnerty. Losing all sense of loyalty to the organisation, Paul does find Finnerty and the mysterious preacher only to throw his lot in with the rebels.

But could the revolution actually succeed?

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Player Piano was Kurt Vonnegut's first novel.

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