Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard is the faux-autobiography of a fictional painter, one of the Modern Expressionists who might gave been in Pollock's circle. A failed one. Convinced by a new friend (frenemy?) to write his memoirs, he embark on a literary journey that is at once slapdash - recursive, redundant, structureless and that he admittedly turns into a diary - and completely riveting. How WOULD a painter WRITE? In this case, not from one corner to the next in sequences, but a little bit here, filling in details there, etc. and so if this book is about anything, it's about Process. The painter's, the writer's, the process of life itself. A mirror of his own work, he goes from copyist, to trend-follower, to erased has-been, to raconteur, keeping at arm's reach the secret he's keeping in his potato barn/studio (the root of the title, referencing the pirate's secret room). In Vonnegut fashion, the prose is breezy, the leitmotifs abound (compare art erasure to the Armenian genocide, for example), and the tone ironic. I'd been too long since I'd picked up a Vonnegut; I won't do that again.