Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

This is the tale of two men on a collision course.  Dwayne Hoover, a successful business man living in Midland City (somewhere in the American mid-west), is going quietly insane.  Kilgore Trout, a down-on-his-luck sci-fi writer living on the East Coast, is invited to speak at the opening of Midland City's new arts centre.  We follow Trout as he travels first to New York then to Midland City.  As he gets closer to his destination, we see the incremental disintegration of Hoover's mental state.  What will happen when the two men finally meet?

Breakfast of Champions is a strange, funny and disturbing novel.  Vonnegut uses many post-modern techniques to tell his tale.  He collapses the distinction between genres by peppering what is, on face value, a realistic story with snippets from Trout's sci-fi writings.  In addition, his narrator enters the story as a character, and one is not sure if the narrator is Vonnegut himself or just another fictional construct.

Vonnegut explores many themes.  Mental illness and suicide are front and centre in the tale.  The marginalisation of minorities also figures heavily.  On this theme, Vonnegut displays his wonderful talent for metaphor and summarising:

...Skid Row.  It was a place where people who didn't have any friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were supposed to go. People like that would be treated with disgust in other neighbourhoods, and policemen would keep them moving.  They were as easy to move, usually, as toy balloons. And they would drift hither and yon, like balloons filled with some gas slightly heavier than air, until they came to rest in Skid Row.

Vonnegut also covers urban violence, and the legitimisation of art.  One notable feature of Breakfast of Champions is the many drawings by the author that are littered through the pages, and they serve to amplify his themes.

A Vonnegut book would not be complete without irony.  The author uses the "N"-word repeatedly throughout the novel although never disparagingly.  The delivery is off-the-cuff but the irony intended is evident.

Yes, Breakfast of Champions is a strange and disturbing book, but is worth the time and effort.  Vonnegut himself considered it one of his lesser works, preferring Mother Night and Slaughterhouse Five.  Good, better, best.  Despite Vonnegut's estimations, Breakfast of Champions remains a good book, even almost four decades after its initial publication.

Midland City is the setting of another Vonnegut novel, Deadeye Dick