Deadeye Dick

Deadeye Dick appeared in 1982, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut whose narrator has been living alongside a single accident for most of his life. Rudy Waltz acquires the nickname as a child in Midland City, Ohio, the fictional town Vonnegut used elsewhere, after a shot fired from a window kills a woman in the street below.

The book is partly a family history, and the family is a joke and a tragedy at the same time. Rudy's father was an artist who knew Hitler in Vienna before either of them was anybody, and his brother, Felix, becomes a television executive whose career ends with his fourth marriage. Vonnegut moves between these lives in the short chapters and flat delivery his readers know.

Rudy's account of himself is the novel's real subject. He calls himself a neuter, keeps his distance from everyone he meets and reports his own history in the same tone he uses for the hotel guests he deals with in Haiti, which makes the book both funnier and bleaker than its premise suggests. A neutron bomb sits in the background of the story from the first pages, mentioned in that same even voice, which is Vonnegut's way of describing the world Midland City belongs to.