BOOK REVIEW : Vonnegut’s Dark Oracle Speaks Plainly : FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, <i> by Kurt Vonnegut</i> ; G.P. Putnam’s Sons $22.95, 240 pages

Now that Kurt Vonnegut has achieved grand-old-man status in American letters--he calls himself “an old poop at last”--he has surely earned the right to sit back and spout off on the subject of what’s wrong with the world. And that is exactly what he does in “Fates Worse Than Death,” an anthology in which Vonnegut freely quotes himself on everything from art and architecture to madness and mass murder.

But “Fates” is hardly a rocking-chair memoir, and Vonnegut’s sense of humor, bitter and ironic, has mellowed not at all. The book seethes with Vonnegut’s outrage at what he sees as the characteristic and probably incurable insanity of the late 20th Century, whether manifested in the intimate setting of a locked ward or on the grand scale of carpet-bombing.

We live in an era, Vonnegut insists, “when so many Americans find the human condition meaningless that they are surrendering their will and their common sense to quacks and racketeers and charismatic lunatics.” And his half-hearted prescriptions for our moral improvement--respect thy neighbor, respect thy planet, etc.--are overwhelmed by a sense of anxiety and despair.

“Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable on information about the human situation,” he writes. “Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?”

Vonnegut is quick to concede that “Fates” is a cut-and-paste job consisting of fragments of his own essays and speeches, all of them stitched together with “breezy autobiographical commentary serving as connective tissue and splints and bandages.” And he plumps up the book with an appendix into which he has tossed some of his source material, including his son’s notes on the experience of schizophrenia, an essay by Karel Capek on contemporary literature, various versions of the Mass, and the text of a World War II briefing manual that demonstrates the strategic insignificance of Dresden.

“Fates” is very much a book of miscellany, but certain themes and figures stalk these pages like familiar ghosts. Perhaps the most insistent of them is Vonnegut’s father, Kurt Sr., a frustrated architect who confessed that the practice of his profession “had been no fun at all, since architecture had everything to do with accounting and nothing to do with art.”

The book is dedicated to Kurt Sr., and Vonnegut allows us to hear his father’s voice “speaking to me across the abyss between the dead and the living.”

Kurt Sr. appears to serve as a kind of lodestar for the restless and questing Vonnegut, and he invokes other friends and relations, writers and artists, in an effort to fix his position in a demonstrably chaotic and dangerous universe. With the self-deprecating humor and the insistent irony that are typical of Vonnegut’s prose, he confesses to engaging in “heavy psychological stevedoring” as he grasps at the memories of the men and women in his life like a man reaching out to catch himself as he falls.

“Human beings have almost always been supported and comforted and disciplined and amused by stable lattices of many relatives and friends until the Great American Experiment,” Vonnegut writes, “which is an experiment not only with liberty but with rootless, mobility and impossibly tough-minded loneliness.”

Another image that haunts Vonnegut and his book is the random and pervasive violence of the late 20th Century as reflected in air war--a phenomenon he experienced personally as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany during the bombing of Dresden and one that he wrote about in what is arguably his most memorable and important book, “Slaughterhouse Five.”

“There is no dearth of persons who could tell you what it is like to be unarmed in a mainly civilian population bombed or rocketed or whatever from the air. There are surely millions of us by now,” Vonnegut writes. “The firebombing of Dresden was an emotional event without a trace of military importance. Only one person on earth clearly benefitted, and I am that person. I got about five dollars for each corpse. . . .”

Vonnegut, who bears an uncanny passing physical resemblance to Mark Twain, has come to resemble Twain in another way: In the fullness of his years, he has allowed the dark oracle of his earlier fiction to come forth and speak plainly. “Fates” is his uncompromising and unreassuring valedictory, the witnessing by a man who has survived the worst of times and lived to tell about it.

Next: Richard Eder reviews Maria Thomas, “African Visas” (Soho).