“They
don’t want anything but smilers out there,” Trout said to his parakeet.
“Unhappy failures need not apply.” But his mind wouldn’t leave it along at
that. He got an idea which he found very tangy: “But maybe an unhappy failure
is exactly what they need to see.”
He became energetic after that. “Bill,
Bill--“ he said, “listen, I’m leaving the cage, but I’m coming back. I’m going
out there to show them what nobody has ever seen at an arts festival before: a
representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives
to a search for truth and beauty – and didn’t find doodley-squat!”
[Excerpt from: Kurt Vonnegut; Breakfast of Champions. Vintage: Croydon. (2000 [first published
1973]). P. 37]
Right now, I am prepared
to believe that Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most cynical people who has ever
lived. Reading his books is like staring at some nightmare parody of the world
we live in, a nightmare made all the worse by how familiar it all is. In Vonnegut’s
world, everything is shit – and while the book is not entirely pleasant to
read, it draws you on, and on, and on, crawling through the awful bleakness and
trying to ignore just how true to life it feels. Sometimes it really makes you
laugh though, with its wild tangents, random observations, childish pictures
and dead-pan delivery – you get the impression that despite all the horror
presented within, the book itself is smiling in a sort of grim anti-humour.
Much like Vonnegut’s earlier book, Slaughterhouse 5, which I recommend to you with every fibre of my
being, Breakfast of Champions is
wrought from the same style; short, direct sentences, self-contained yet
interlinked paragraphs, sprawling tangents, and the author’s all-pervasive
tone. All throughout the book it feels as though some random guy is explaining
all the different little ways in which life is horrible – no, scratch that,
it’s like an outsider’s guide to the human race. He presents them – people, I
mean – as essentially organic machines, objectively showing us all the
complicated little ways in which they can go wrong. The writing seems quite
cold, distant from the subject matter, almost objective in the way it splats
out its insightful views, despite the ghastly things it’s always going on
about. ‘This is the way the world is’, it says, calmly describing such awful
things as suicide, environmental damage, racism, and rape. ‘And fuck me if I’m
going to pretend it isn’t so, like just about every other story in the world’.
Here you don’t get heroes and villains, a roaring whirlwind plot, a happy
ending – heck, you’d be hard-pressed to even find something that can be
considered an ending here. And the writer explains, in the body of the text
itself, why he has included the plot points and characters he has, and why he
doesn’t like such artificial things as story endings.
The story itself is rather simple, if you choose to see it
that way. Dwayne Hoover is a successful car-salesman in some God-forsaken city
in the middle of America, and he is going mad – in the actual mental illness
sort of way. We are told about the ending at the beginning of the novel, as
Vonnegut likes to do, in which Dwayne Hoover finally snaps and goes on a
rampage, hurting many people in the process. He will become unhinged after
reading a cheap novel by Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction writer who
also appeared in Slaughterhouse 5, and
who gets invited to Dwayne Hoover’s home city as a guest for an arts festival.
The subsequent novel offers a few details about Kilgore Trout’s journey across
America, and Dwayne Hoover’s traumatic few days of mental illness before the
two of them finally meet, as well as a hundred different things the author
decided to chuck into the book; such as the odd plot-synopsis of Kilgore
Trout’s work. They’re all a sort of crummy kind of cheap sci-fi, yet they all
serve as something the reader can easily understand, a lens with which to look
at the world and thereby better understand what the book is trying to convey.
In one such plot synopsis he tells the tale of an alien species who consider eating
in the same light as humans consider sexual intercourse; leading to entirely
food-based films which they consider racy pornography. Weird, yes? But deeply astute when you actually read it.
Let’s talk about the pictures now. Throughout the entirety
of Breakfast of Champions are doodles
and simple ink-drawings by the author, usually to illustrate something that he
has just mentioned. Being a guide-book for somebody who is ignorant of the
human species, and of American culture specifically, we occasionally get a
childish little drawing of something the average reader might take for granted,
such as an American flag, the date 1492, an apple, a rattlesnake, and a stork
carrying a baby. This helps in illustrating, quite blandly, such things as the
differences between two completely different sorts of beaver, two different
things that are both called beetles, the differences between a chicken and a
chicken prepared by a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and
multiple lorry profiles with different words on the side. These frequent basic
doodles, coupled with the simple, direct voice of the author, and the banality
of the subject matter all go to make the book seem like the mad ramblings of a
crazy person. Which of course it is; and it’s amazing. Sometimes you’re caught
between laughter and tears, unsure of how to react to this bleak, barefaced
look at the world.
If I had one criticism of this book, it is that maybe, just
maybe, that it is not quite as good as Slaughterhouse
5. Breakfast of Champions is a
bit longer, and somehow does not feel quite so focused as the previous one;
don’t get me wrong, it’s nothing less than a brilliant piece of Vonnegut, and as
the first of his books I ended up reading it converted me into an instant fan,
but I might be inclined to recommend it to people only if they wanted more than
Slaughterhouse 5 offered. Then again,
it’s not really a proper criticism; I’m just saying that maybe shorter is
better for something as unusual as this – but then, I have no problem with
people going and getting themselves a copy of this as a first-time reader.
They’re both brilliant, and more people need to know about them.
Bibiary
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. Vintage:
Croydon. (2000 [first published 1973]).
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