I never took an American lit class in college, so I am still attempting to fill the holes with some of the seminal authors that I missed, Kurt Vonnegut being one. I read Slaughterhouse Five years ago and mostly what I remember is it being weird- which prepared me for Breakfast of Champions.
The novel follows two main characters, Dwayne Hoover, a successful car salesman in Midland City, Ohio, and Kilgore Trout, a fictional author that shows up in several Vonnegut novels. Hoover is inching his way closer to a nervous breakdown as he is sponsoring an arts festival in Midland City and Trout is inching his way physically closer to Trout to attend said festival. The novel follows each of their journeys, culminating with an explosive meeting. Things get very meta as the fourth wall breaks down and the narrator, who up until then had just been an omnipresent voice, becomes a character.
In some ways the weirdness feels like The Crying of Lot 49, which I also read this year, or a Eugene Ionesco absurdist play. Plot-wise, Vonnegut’s novel was easier to follow and easier to read, although both are short novels (Breakfast of Champions was technically longer, but when you add in the occasional hand-drawn illustrations things move quickly).
Overall, I’m still confused by the deeper meaning I’m supposed to be pulling from this novel. Wikipedia tells me Vonnegut focuses on “suicide, free will, mental illness, and social and economic cruelty”. I guess I can see some of that in retrospect, but the pacing and language are quick and almost glib, so as I read I wasn’t pulling them out as deeper themes to ruminate on. The readers of Goodreads seem largely to love this one, and reading some of the things they’ve pulled out as highlights, I can see why (see: the definition of capitalists as sea pirates).
Maybe the sweep of the plot carried me along to quickly and I should have enjoyed it in smaller snippets with pauses between to consider? Maybe this is the wrong Vonnegut for me? (Or maybe Vonnegut isn’t the author for me, which makes me sad. I’d always pictured myself as weird and quirky, a perfect Vonnegut reader- I love the ‘so it goes’ tattoos!) I’ll give him one more go in something else and if its still not capturing me, then accept that I need to find a different style of weird and quirky. (So it goes?).