Quick Hit: "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut

At this point in the summer, it should be time for another "Sandman" review, but I'm out of town this weekend--as I was last weekend because I'm very popular and important--and there isn't time.

I'm going to do a very quick review of Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions," which I read in a single sitting on the Fourth of July, Independence Day, America's birthday, the best of all days etc.

This is the second Vonnegut book I've reviewed. The other one was "Slaughterhouse-Five" if you want to relive the magic. I thought it would be appropriate to read Vonnegut on Independence Day because he always has such cutting things to say about American society, and "Breakfast of Champions" is no different.

This is the first work of his I've read that deals explicitly with racism, and I was pleased to discover that he does it right, for lack of a better term. Not to be down on the genre, but scifi writers, especially male ones, tend to hold some troubling views about sex, gender, and racial politics ("John Carter of Mars"). It always bums me out to read something racist or sexist in a book I've been enjoying up to that point, because I'm not a person who can sweep aside the more problematic elements of a work and enjoy the rest of it at face value. Once the author has revealed himself as racist or sexist, the work loses credibility in my eyes.

But we're not talking about those authors, we're talking about Vonnegut, who I feel to be the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain. His books are basically, "This is bullshit, and this is bullshit, and this thing here that you've never thought that deeply about, it's bullshit too, and fuck the wealthy and the awful people with too much money and power, and fuck you for putting up with it, you poor doomed bastards."

But, you know--literary.

"Breakfast of Champions" is the least scifi book of his that I've read. There are no aliens, time travel, post-apocalyptic scenarios, or crazy inventions. A wealthy man in a Midwestern town is going mad; an aging and unsuccessful scifi author is hitchhiking to the Midwestern town to attend an arts festival there; they briefly collide; and eventually the scifi author is going to win the Nobel Prize in medicine for his theories on ideas as viruses.

There's also a few subplots about writers as the Creators of small universes, since the narrator of the story is the writer of the story. It gets a little meta in places, for example when the author explains that he gave this character's mother these traits because the writer's own mother had them, and it scarred the writer in the same way that it scarred the character. And yet, even though the book tells you several times that this is all made up and even pulls back the curtain to show you how its crafted, the story never stops feeling meaningful. It's an amazing thing that I don't feel I've described very well here. You just have to read it yourself and experience the genius that is Vonnegut.

Final grade: B. I always enjoy Vonnegut, but this isn't one of his stronger works. Recommended for fans of the author and those who like biting social commentary. Happy Independence Day!

Review: "Slaughterhouse-five" by Kurt Vonnegut

I could have sworn it was "Slaughterhouse-5," with a digit, but the Internet informs me that it's "Slaughterhouse-five," with the word.

So memory is a funny thing, as we see in Kurt Vonnegut's semi-autobiographical anti-war novel. Vonnegut, if you don't know, was a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany in the waning days of World War II. He survived the Allied firebombing of that city and swore that he would one day write his "famous Dresden book" about the attack, which he considered the most important thing that had ever happened to him, after being born, getting married and having children.

Ordinarily, this is the sort of book that I would review during Banned Books Week, since it was one of the most frequently challenged books of the 1990s. But Delacorte Press recently published a volume of Vonnegut's letters and essays, edited by Dan Wakefield, and selections from the book have been making the rounds on the Internet, putting me in the mood for Vonnegut's wit and humanity. If you've never read any Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse-five" (or "Cat's Cradle" if you prefer more traditional storytelling) is a good place to start. It combines Vonnegut's trademark deadpan humor with the surprisingly tender grasp of human frailty that made him one of America's greatest writers.

The firebombing of Dresden is the moral centerpiece of 1969's "Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death." The book, arguable Vonnegut's most famous and influential work, was nominated for a National Book Award, though as you can read for yourself in this 1969 New York Times book review, it's always struggled to claw its way out of the science fiction ghetto into its very deserved place in the ranks of serious literary satire.

The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is "unstuck in time." He never knows what part of his life he is going to experience next, and he lives in a perpetual state of anxiety, never knowing if he is going to walk through a door into the firebombing of Dresden or wake up naked in a zoo on the alien planet Tralfalmadore, where he is the main exhibit. The non-linear style of writing is one of the greatest strengths of the book, because we get to see scenes of absolute lunacy and utter weirdness juxtaposed with horrific scenes of war and human suffering. You've never realized how stupid and senseless war is until it's all jumbled up with flying saucers and aliens shaped like toilet plungers.

Vonnegut had a rare talent for taking huge, almost unfathomable ideas and breaking them down to the hard and simple nuggets of truth at their core. I think one of the comforting things about war is that it's so big and confusing that we can sometimes hide from its reality by convincing ourselves it's much for our puny human brains to comprehend. "Slaughterhouse-five" strips away all of that comforting confusion and forces us to understand and grapple with the worst aspects of humanity. There is nowhere to hide from this blazing torch of a novel.

Final grade is A. Recommended for first-time Vonnegut readers, and fans of satire, science fiction, politics, and peace. Not recommended for people who can't stand gore and bodily functions. There's no shame in that, I'm just warning you that there's a lot of diarrhea in this book.