Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I thought I was going to read Cat's Cradle - that's the first or second most famous Vonnegut book, and I'd re-read Slaughterhouse-Five a few years back, so it seemed the obvious next step.

But what I had was a Library of America book, with Cat and Slaughterhouse and also God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions. So I poked at the beginnings of the other three novels, and ended up reading this one. Who knows why? The first pages were more open, maybe more purely Vonnegutian, and that hooked me.

So I read Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday! for the first time since the early Eighties. The novel that began Vonnegut's late period, if we're being polite, or his minor period, if we're being honest. I'm using the cover of the edition I read in paperback, way back when, instead of the current paperback cover, or the serious, bland LoA cover, just because.

Vonnegut was always discursive, and got more so as he went on - his early novels have plots and clear character development and all that, but, as he went on, his books turned more and more into mosaics, in which Vonnegut spoke directly to the reader about his concerns at the time, telling the story and interrupting it in turn. Well, I haven't re-read the novels after Breakfast for a long time: I have a sense this may have been the peak of that style, that he calmed back down a bit after this. So maybe I should focus on the novel I just read.

Breakfast contains a lot of Vonnegut's best paragraphs and sentences, and, in many ways, is the culmination of the ideas and concerns of the first two decades of his career. But the ending fizzles rather than snaps, and the overall impression is of a big shaggy-dog story, with the readers both the dogs and the audience. What it shows, I think, most of all, is that Vonnegut style - which seems so random and flowing, artless and immediate - is actually both carefully constructed and terribly fragile. When it works - and it does work, for most of the novel - it's immediate and overwhelming, the voice of truth and reality. But when it stumbles, everything it carries drops and the artifice is obvious.

Vonnegut says, early on, that this book will be swan-song for a lot of his continuing characters. Most of all, this was to be the final appearance of Kilgore Trout, the visionary science fiction writer - Vonnegut quickly sketches out, as an aside, the rest of his life and how he dies - who had wandered through several Vonnegut books before this one. This time, though, as Vonnegut puts it at the beginning of the first chapter:

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

One of them was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.

The man he met was an automobile dealer, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover. Dwayne Hoover was on the brink of going insane.

Not to anatomize too much, but "on the brink of going insane" is pretty close to the Platonic idea description of every Vonnegut protagonist. Dwayne, in particular, is poised for a psychotic break, and gets one after reading a Trout story in which the reader is the only real person in a universe constructed as an experiment. This happens in the very last chapter - Breakfast is all build-up and no pay-off - where Dwayne goes on a violent rampage during an arts festival.

Vonnegut's point is clear, and consistent from earlier books: human beings need to care about each other. Not doing so leads to ruin, he says, gesturing around himself. He says this over and over, in different ways, usually with a sense, buried or obvious, that it's already too late and that empathy would have been needed long ago. (See that "dying fast," above.)

It's a quick read, and, as I said, it's full of great Vonnegut sentences and thoughts. If you're at all in sympathy with his ideas, it will be a strong experience. But the ending is both deliberately telegraphed from the beginning and accidentally fumbled, which means it ends more quietly, less definitively than it should.

Oh, well. Or, perhaps I should say instead: so it goes.