We Are What We Pretend To Be

We Are What We Pretend to Be begins with “Basic Training,” a novella Vonnegut finished near the beginning of his writing career—only two years before his first novel, Player Piano, was published, as his daughter notes in the foreword. “Basic Training” involves Haley Brandon, a decidedly urban young man sent to live with relatives at a farm. The second half of We Are What We Pretend to Be consists of another novella, “If God Were Alive Today,” written when Vonnegut was seventy-eight years old, and featuring Gil Berman, a severely misanthropic comedian.