Book Club: Breakfast of Champions

This has been sitting in the unfinished queue for more than a month -- figured I'd bang it out right quick today. Breakfast of Champions is by Kurt Vonnegut, arguably his funniest book. As is pointed out right from the start, it has nothing to do with General Mills breakfast cereals, and should not taint the image of their fine products.

This book is hilarious, charming and scary. As the NYT book reviewer said back in 1973, "[Vonnegut] wheels out all the latest fashionable complaints about America -- her racism, her gift for destroying language, her technological greed and selfishness--and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful, and lovable, all at the same time."

Take this passage describing the importance placed on Columbus' discovering the New World. I laughed out loud.

Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

The deadpan description style and tone belies the sarcasm and wit therein. The basic story follows two men -- Kilgore Trout, an aged science fiction writer who is relatively sane; and Dwayne Hoover, a very well-off businessman who happens to be completely insane. The story follows these two til their inevitable meeting, when one of Trout's stories drives Hoover to a violent rampage.

There is a lot in this book, too much for a blog post. Questions of awareness and crude sketches. It gets pretty meta toward the end, when "the author" writes himself into the book. This author is a version of Vonnegut (presumably) who then meets Trout, who is also a version of Vonnegut (I think). And so on.