Mother Night

Howard W. Campbell Jr. was an American playwright who became a Nazi propagandist during WWII — delivering radio broadcasts that inflamed hatred across Germany — but was simultaneously, secretly, a spy for the Americans whose coded messages inside those broadcasts saved thousands of Allied lives. After the war nobody can prove he was a spy. He is tried as a war criminal. The novel's moral is stated directly by Vonnegut in his introduction: we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Darker than Slaughterhouse-Five, less comfortable than Cat's Cradle — the dark humor is present but the grief is heavier, the complicity is real, and the comedy is the thing that makes the moral bearable rather than the thing that makes it land. The most morally serious Vonnegut novel and the one that most honestly confronts the question of what it means to do terrible things for good reasons.