Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut – He finally did it, a complimentary portrayal of women!

Tl;dr – If you've struggled with Vonnegut due in large part to his portrayal of women in his novels, please please please give this book a try.

My fanboyism for Vonnegut has only grown stronger with every Vonnegut novel I've finished thus far, but that doesn't mean I'm not aware of a glaring weakness in his writing overall, which is his portrayal of women. One can argue there's an element of his works being a sign of the times they were written, but the fact of the matter is that his female characters are decidedly lackluster and/or painfully one-dimensional in most of his novels. Most of them are either stereotypical 1900s housewife/widow types or some generic form of working woman like an office secretary. There are perhaps a couple exceptions in ALL of his first 11 novels that defy those characteristics, and those who do defy them don't get much screen time.

Well, I'm happy to report that he finally managed to figure it out a bit with his 12th novel Bluebeard! So far in 2025 I have read all 12 of those novels for the first time in the following order: Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, Player Piano, Mother Night, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, Slapstick, Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, Galápagos, and finally Bluebeard.

Bluebeard is the real-time portrayal of former artist and businessman Rabo Karabekian (a name some of us may remember from Breakfast of Champions) writing his autobiography. The narrative switches back and forth between callbacks to his past with frequent inserts of his present along the way. Aside from what I've already mentioned, Vonnegut uses his signature sarcastic wit to hammer home some familiar cynical anti-war messaging spanning all the way back to WWI through Vietnam. Rabo tells the story of his family, first-generation US residents who settled in California after fleeing their homes during the Armenian genocide.

As a kid with some legitimate artistic potential, he writes to the only well-known successful Armenian artist/illustrator currently living in the US, Dan Gregory (formerly Gregorian). While he doesn't make direct contact with Gregory, he does receive responses back from Gregory's mistress Marilee Kemp, and the two exchange letters over the years. Through a long series of communication and events, Rabo eventually gets the invite to New York to become Gregory's apprentice.

I won't dive into any spoilers for those who haven't read the novel, but Marilee Kemp becomes a significant influence in Rabo's life over the course of a couple decades from that point and is a strikingly strong (relative to Vonnegut at the very least) character who shows a lot of her own personal development as the novel goes on. In parallel to those events when the novel switches back to the present, a woman named Circe Berman appears in old-man Rabo's life and they develop a very oddly endearing friendship. Circe is the one who inspired him to write the autobiography that serves as the novel's overall template.

Now, both Circe and Merilee have their faults (as does every single Vonnegut character ever, gender notwithstanding), but those faults feel far more human than I've read of any Vonnegut female character before, and they both show life and personality. Their positive influence over Rabo is palpable, intellectual, painful, and endearing.

Bluebeard earns a STRONG 9.5/10 for me, and has cracked into my top 3 favorite novels of his. The ending legitimately had my eyes welling up, and I'm beyond pleased with the amount of character progression compared to any of his other works so far. Typically he's more themes over character/plot, which is totally fine for what it is, but he executes an incredible deviation from his norm with Bluebeard, and I'd recommend it to anybody in a heartbeat.

Next up, Hocus Pocus.