“[The] syllabus of adolescent male samizdat … used to go like this: Mad magazine at 13, Vonnegut at 15, Salinger at 17, Hunter Thompson at 18, Kerouac at 20. (When you got real big, you read Kundera.)” William Deresiewicz returned to Vonnegut’s novels at age 48. “Some of them are worse than I remembered, but some of them are even better.”