A 20th-century Twain.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Kurt Vonnegut named a son after Mark Twain, and the two writers had more in common than unruly hair and a predilection for puncturing pieties. Both responded to their times with humor - but Vonnegut, a survivor of the Dresden firebombing and an inhabitant of a world in which humanity had acquired the means to destroy itself, had a darker view.

For Vonnegut, who died last Wednesday at age 84, the bleakness of life was relieved only by its absurdity, and redeemed only by kindness.

Vonnegut's inventive shuffling of literary genres, notably by weaving elements of science fiction into contemporary settings, prevented him from being regarded as a serious writer in academic circles, but his style and his outlook were widely influential. A generation of Americans in the 1960s and '70s devoured his 19 novels, and some of them - "Slaughterhouse Five," "Cat's Cradle" - promise to endure.

Vonnegut's heroes are not heroic - they are ordinary, even less than ordinary, slobs caught up in the machinery of events beyond their control. His villains are not evildoers - they are forces of history that push culture and society in inhumane directions. There's nothing original about such a determinist outlook, but Vonnegut's genius was to make it funny. And laughter, even when it's of the gallows variety, always lifts the gloom.

Though Vonnegut did important work outside the literary field as a political essayist, an opponent of censorship and a defender of civil liberties, these activities were consistent with his fiction. In his life and in his novels, he stood against authority, bullies and ignorance, always with the weary smile of one who suspects he's on the losing side. May he find contentment in an afterlife on the planet of his invention, Tralfamadore.