Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read everything Vonnegut had written when I first got into him in high school more than 30 years ago. A lot of it was still fairly new then, and I felt pretty good about myself for reading stuff that felt like the sign of a serious collegiate thinker. I’ve made it a kind of project to revisit it over the last few years to see if it holds up, and the verdict has been, for the most part, yes. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat’s Cradle are still really satisfying. They’re novels that raise some heavy ideas in the guise of light comedy, and they tell stories that become compelling the longer they go.
If those other, more polished novels didn’t exist, I’d give Breakfast of Champions a higher rating. As it is, though, a lot of what makes this one memorable comes to us more skillfully in those others. This has some intriguing and memorable sections. “What kind of a man turns his daughter into an outboard motor” is still funny, still as outrageous as when I first got it as a youth swimmer myself.
But large portions of this seem mannered, seem almost as if they are Vonnegut trying to imitate Vonnegut.
Kilgore Trout may be a striking figure in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, but here he is largely a projection of Vonnegut feeling sorry for himself. At his best, he brings a Bukowski seediness, but by the end, he runs out of gas. At the risk of spoiling something, he winds up in conversation with Vonnegut himself, part of the novel as a character, in an exchange that seems almost an admission that Vonnegut has written himself into a corner.
Some of the tropes get old as well. I get the insight that humans as “meat machines” is sardonic and cynical, but the ninth or tenth time we get the size of someone’s penis or a woman’s bust/waist/hip measurements, the joke gets old. Too much of this is recycled, too much Vonnegut trying to recapture something he’s dealt with earlier.
All that said, there are still many joys here. This novel comes at the end of Vonnegut’s best run, and there’s a boldness to it – especially at the beginning – that you can’t ignore. Even if it reassembles earlier successful characters, it announces itself as a radical experiment in cynicism and despair. It’s dark in an earned way, an effort to figure out what’s left when you’ve decided there’s nothing left to say. Still, bottom line, I can’t help feeling this is likely where Vonnegut ‘jumped the shark,’ where he went from being one of the real voices of his generation to a man who could no longer quite find the form for his idealistic pessimism, for his sense that we human beings are squandering the remarkable existence we’ve been granted.
View all my reviews
Here's my more recent review of the book. I can't seem to figure out how to edit my blog posts here, in two halves:
ReplyDeleteI am revisiting this novel after a period of heavily re-thinking my sense of Vonnegut, and I can’t read it outside the context of the arc of Vonnegut’s larger career. This book matters, I think, because it is his first after Slaughterhouse-Five. Clumsy and broken as it is, I think it takes what power it has from that historical fact.
I read Vonnegut very much within his own bibliography. Player Piano (his first) is solid enough, though its narrative shortcomings compromise it. Sirens of Titan is the first time he seems to get his act together, but he isn’t all that serious, and he inflects his trauma over his World War II experiences to a goofy sci-fi sub-plot.
The first of his must-reads is Mother Night. It’s the first time he deals with the war directly, and he raises some powerful questions. Unlike Hannah Arendt, who is struck by the “banality of evil” when she observes Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Vonnegut finds a potentially darker conclusion: we are all evil for our complicity in the system that produced such catastrophe. Another’s guilt is simply our excuse. (If you’re looking for under-appreciate Vonnegut, start with this one.)
Then comes Cat’s Cradle, which is wonderfully clever and one of the great accessible meditations on the limits of spirituality and the potential for human self-destruction. It deserves its reputation as Vonnegut’s second-best work. Still, it deals with the war indirectly, folding Vonnegut’s personal trauma into a more global anger at the arrogance, and childishness, of our world leaders.
Then it’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a moving meditation on the possibilities of Christian decency in a society that, to the avowedly atheistic Vonnegut, has lost all sight of authentic Christianity. Crucially, we see Elliot Rosewater brought to his benign state of decency as a result of his own World War II trauma.
The great power of Slaughterhouse Five, then, comes from Vonnegut finally confronting the trauma he has so long subordinated in his other novels. Most of Slaughterhouse, especially the early parts, reads as a man going somewhere he doesn’t want to go. It picks up on a Vonnegut theme of books that get started and not finished, but this time – perhaps this one time – it does finish the story it sets out to tell. The whole novel works for me. It’s clever and horrifying all at once, and it offers a damning critique of 20th Century humanity. But its final 3-4 pages, when Vonnegut describes the horrors of Dresden, work for me as the true center of his literary career. Having written them, having at last said what he deferred saying in such creative ways for so long, he reaches a catharsis that still lives on the page.
Part 2:
ReplyDeleteThe great challenge of Breakfast of Champions, then, is to find something to say after Vonnegut has said his most secret and central truth. And, truth be told, it’s frustrating to watch him as he searches through possible topics.
He does sound out the prospect of exploring his other great life trauma, the suicide of his mother, but he doesn’t deal with it in any sustained fashion, nor does he find ways to inflect it onto a story as compelling as his earlier novels. He talks throughout about “bad chemicals” as a clearly unsatisfying explanation for human evil of the sort Dwayne Hoover unleashes at the end, but that’s an uninspired reflection on violence and self-violence.
You can sense his frustration, though, a frustration he takes out on the banality of popular culture, advertising in particular. He implies that the trouble he’s having with his story comes from the failure of language and literature. Everything has been coopted into marketing, into something designed to compel others to do things they might not necessarily have done.
Our old friend and Vonnegut stand-in Kilgore Trout represents that matter directly. Until he appears in the novel (courtesy of his one fan, Elliot Rosewater) he has been an abject commercial failure. Ironically, that’s his salvation from this corrupt, marketing-saturated world. He has the capacity to imagine authentic stories – silly, yes, but authentic in the way they are designed to interrogate the flaws of our contemporary culture – because no one reads or cares about his work. But Vonnegut damns him here as well, cursing him to a wide readership, economic success, and irrelevance – an irrelevance (or at least fraudulence) that we can sense Vonnegut accusing himself with.
It should be no wonder, then, that his “story” here consists of nothing more than a man who, because he is insane, attacks a series of characters Vonnegut has brought together. It’s a deconstructed showdown, one we’re warned about long in advance, and one that – in the end – is no more complicated than a story we could hear most nights on most big-city newscasts.
This book is pretty awful on its own terms, then, and I discourage anyone from reading it who hasn’t worked through Vonnegut’s earlier stuff.
That said, there is real power here in the way it self-consciously reflects on the shadow of Slaughterhouse Five and its predecessors. This is a novelist with something to say – at least one who had a great deal to say until he said the kernel at the heart of it – and it’s heartbreaking to see him confront the possibility that he has nothing left in his typewriter but clichés and repeated slogans.
This novel is no more the “breakfast of champions” than is Wheaties or the martinis a young waitress supplies. It’s depressing in its failure, but it’s illuminating in the way it owns that failure and meditates on what it means to attempt to write anything in our age.
My working theory is that this is the last Vonnegut novel worth reading, and that it is so largely as the bitter dessert to the novels that work so well before it. I am testing that by reading more of his later works, but so far none of those have seemed to me to matter especially much. This one is Vonnegut confronting the possibility that he no longer has anything to say. I worry that might have been true.