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The Powells.com Interview with Margaret Atwood

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   The Year of the Flood

   Margaret Atwood

Staff Pick

After Slaughterhouse Five came out in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut entered a long period of depression and swore he would never write another novel. Fortunately he was lying, and in 1973, out came Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (the subtitle alluding to his fog lifting). Four years of pent-up Vonnegut humor spilled out onto the page. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut's scathing satire and brilliant doodling at their peak. (If you've ever wondered what an asshole looks like up close, this is the book for you.) It is, as the author notes, in no way intended to disparage General Mills or its fine products.
Recommended by Frank, Powells.com

After Slaughterhouse Five came out in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut entered a long period of depression and swore he would never write another novel. Fortunately he was lying, and in 1973, out came Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (the subtitle alluding to his fog lifting). Four years of pent-up Vonnegut humor spilled out onto the page. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut's scathing satire and brilliant doodling at their peak. (If you've ever wondered what an asshole looks like up close, this is the book for you.) It is, as the author notes, in no way intended to disparage General Mills or its fine products.
Recommended by Frank, Powells.com

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TheGreatDane, May 12, 2009 (view all comments by TheGreatDane)
For those who eat, sleep and breathe literature, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions certainly lives up to its name. It is a brilliant piece of social commentary on modern America that continues to be relevant in the new millennium. He explores racism, pollution, and sexuality in a way that is both simple and telling. While his modern style may contain some interesting quirks, readers should not let this allow them to put the book back on the shelf.
Breakfast of Champions is a darkly humorous tale about the brief meeting of two men: the elderly science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the successful Pontiac salesman Dwayne Hoover. The novel covers Trout’s journey from New York City to Midland City to attend the opening of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in hopes of inspiring shock and disgust in the other attendees. Meanwhile, the reader gets to dip into the life of the “fabulously well-to-do” Dwayne Hoover, a resident of Midland City, as he goes completely insane. Vonnegut exposes the readers not only to the oddities of these two men, but also indulges in explaining the details of other seemingly minor characters such as Dwayne’s son George “Bunny” Hoover, a waitress named Patty Keene, and a young doctor named Cyprian Ukwende. In the end, all of these characters are linked by Hoover’s insanity-driven attack. Despite its fractured appearance, the novel’s structure actually helps to explain the themes and ideas of the novel.
While the novel appears to be full of random tangents and Sharpie doodles, Vonnegut actually uses these to highlight the ridiculous and shallow aspects of American society. For instance, “A Pyramid was a sort of huge stone tomb which Egyptians had built thousands and thousands of years before…” (112) followed by a simple, two-toned drawing of three pyramids. While this may seem both irrelevant and unnecessary, it is actually very clever in context. The drawing is in reference to a shipping truck with “Pyramid” written on the side simply because the owner “liked the sound of it”. The cartoon helps show how people do not pay attention to context or details; they act on impulse and without logic. The doodle is not only telling, its simplicity adds humor to the situation instead of being outright critical of American culture.
Vonnegut also covers a number of modern social issues in the novel, one being racism. Vonnegut plainly points out racial discrimination and preconceptions without worrying about what is politically correct. For example, “Dwayne asked a white workman how many horsepower drove the machine. All the workers were white. ‘We call it The Hundred Nigger Machine,’ said the workman. This had reference to a time when black men had done most of the heavy digging in Midland City” (150). Here, Vonnegut does not hesitate to use a potentially offensive word like “nigger” to illustrate the workmen’s feelings of superiority. Instead of trying to cover up an embarrassing part of American history or pretending that racism is gone, Vonnegut exposes it plainly and without frills. His honesty leaves the reader unable to avoid racism and forces them to examine whether or not it is present today.
Another social issue Vonnegut points out is pollution. People’s careless attitude is extraordinarily obvious in Breakfast of Champions. It is very matter-of-factly stated that “Trout marveled at how recently white men had arrived in West Virginia, and how quickly they had demolished it – for heat. Now the heat was all gone, too – into outer space, Trout supposed” (125). In the novel, commenting of the condition of West Virginia feels irrelevant but is very telling of the attitude Vonnegut perceives society to have. Just as Kilgore Trout is not troubled by walking through a polluted stream that covers his feet in plastic, few people stop to think about what has been done to the land. The carelessness of society is exposed leaving the readers to decide for themselves how to feel about it and what to do.
While Breakfast of Champions is an extremely entertaining satire, it is certainly not for people who are conservative or easily offended. For instance, Vonnegut points out America’s preoccupation with sex by going on tangents about the penis size of various male characters as well as the body measurements of the female characters. He even goes so far as to briefly discuss the presence of “wide open beavers” in pornographic novels, complete with a sketch to illustrate the difference between the animal and the body part. The pervasiveness of sex in American thought and media is made abundantly clear, but for a reader that cannot look past this type of content to see the commentary, this is not the book for them.
Breakfast of Champions is a smart and interesting read that comments on many different aspects of modern American society. While its content may not appeal to more conservative readers, it is the perfect choice for any person that enjoys dark comedy and great satire.

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Caleb.hickenlooper, January 25, 2008 (view all comments by Caleb.hickenlooper)

Breakfast of Champions, in its simplest form, is the story of a very unbalanced car salesman named Dwayne Hoover who, after reading a science fiction novel by the poor, lonely, eccentric, and extremely prolific writer, Kilgore Trout, becomes convinced that he is the only real human being on earth. It is a very simple story and can only account for about half of the pages of this “novel”.
The rest of the book is devoted to various tangents, rambles, and other forms of drool (easily recognized by his unique arrows) that seem to be intended to be either profound and insightful, or shockingly perverted and explicit. Whatever they’re intended purpose, these little side-shows, because of their content: penis measurements, descriptions of pornography, and a list of activities in the average prisoner’s sex life, (including gay oral and anal sex, as well as cow raping) are inarguably memorable. (I already forgot the ones that were supposed to be profound.(I’m pretty sure there was a decent one about white men “colonizing America”)). In order to further imprint his book on your mind, Vonnegut draws pictures, always preceded by the phrase “It looked like this:” Again, some, such as the electric chair, were somewhat profound, but most were either pointless (Goodbye blue Sunday?), or disgusting (Assholes and “Beavers”), or both.
In his defense, his writing is sometimes clever, for example, I loved the way he put himself into his own story, but it is not naturally entertaining. It seems to me that he is trying desperately to be insightful and culturally relevant, but he comes out seeming just scatter-brained. There is no unifying point to the story. It ends very randomly with the Author “setting his characters free”, after making them all very poor, very confused, very miserable, or very dead, or all four at the same time. Hopefully this can be taken as a promise that he will never write another book like this “novel”, ever again.

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Chirpee, May 24, 2007 (view all comments by Chirpee)
What can you say about Vonnegut? This book is all the things I think of when I think of Vonnegut - witty, satirical, hysterical, brilliant, memorable, thought-provoking, and perfect. We are all lucky that he wrote and kept writing, and that we have the opportunity to enjoy and learn from his work.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780385334204

Author:

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.

Author:

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.

Publisher:

Delta

Location:

New York :

Subject:

Literary

Subject:

Humorous Stories

Subject:

American fiction (fictional works by one author)

Subject:

Science fiction

Subject:

Authorship

Subject:

Satire

Subject:

Science fiction -- Authorship -- Fiction.

Subject:

Humorous fiction

Subject:

Science fiction -- Authorship.

Copyright:

c197

Series Volume:

no. 5

Publication Date:

May 1999

Binding:

Paperback

Language:

English

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

320

Dimensions:

801x529x86 61