Just Finished Reading Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is the author responsible for the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five, which was later made into a film...I've experienced both and give two "thumbs up".  So I thought I'd venture into another of the late writer's books, this time his 1973 short novel Breakfast of Champions.  In it Vonnegut lets loose all of his criticisms about America...I guess back in the early seventies that was a fashionable, lucrative thing to do in the world of literature but nowadays it comes across (at least to me) as cynical, overgeneralized, and condemnatory.  The premise of the story is simple enough: two middle-age men meet in a diner and have a conversation, causing one to go mad and the other to go down the path of literary fame.  The writer of the two, Kilgore Trout (who also has a small role in Slaughterhouse Five), has been frustrated all his career with his science fiction stories, with only porno magazines willing to publish them.  But he has a mysterious, wealthy benefactor, a Mr. Rosewater, who behind Trout's back has been promoting his works...to the point where he is invited to speak at a writer's convention in the town of Midland City, Ohio.  Determined to show everyone how depraved a writer he really is, Trout goes out of his way to present a poor appearance as he steps into the diner upon arriving in town.  Also there is Dwayne Hoover, a very successful Pontiac salesman with a charismatic personality...and on the edge of sanity.  When Trout lets Hoover...who happens to be a speed-reader...read one of his sci-fi books...that pushes the latter over the edge.  Trout's story's premise is that the "creator" of everyone made everyone, except the reader, as nothing more than biological machines, whose interactions through history and the present are only there to cause reactions from the only entity with free will in the universe.  Hoover takes the story literally and sees himself as that one truly living being...and goes berserk with those around him.  Although this narrative in Breakfast of Champions gets presented at the novel's end, it's also revealed early on...so I'm not giving anything away...

Vonnegut made Breakfast of Champions as idiosyncratic as he could, interspersing the text with his own crude illustrations, along for some reason with the measurements of the male characters' private parts (to ridicule the obsession among some about this, I suppose). He wrote both as the "creator" and as someone who is explaining the events and their context to someone far off in the future and in another place.  It was a little disconcerting that the author decided to insert himself later on into the story among his own characters...but I've read something very similar when Stephen King did the same toward the end of his Dark Tower series: I find it all very self-indulgent of Vonnegut (as well as King).  Vonnegut did provide a worthy service to me, though, when he defined alcoholic drinks as "yeast excrement"...yes that's a good, negative-imagery deterrent if I ever heard one...

If you like a heavily sardonic, brutally critical short novel that beats up on your own culture, then Breakfast of Champions is the book for you...I found it left me with a case of literary indigestion...