Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Edition: Vintage, 2000 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1402

Even today, Breakfast of Champions is a strange novel, and it would have seemed odder in 1973. It is perhaps even misleading to call it a novel, given the way it is written. Such plot as it has is revealed in the first few pages. It concerns the influence failed science fiction writer Kilgore Trout ends up having on the world. The other main character, Dwayne Hoover, is gradually going mad through the novel, which ends when he and Trout meet. Trout appears in many of Vonnegut's works, including his most famous novel Slaughterhouse Five, and is often the character used to express of the author's ideas - but here Vonnegut also makes himself a character. The plot is not only minimal, it is clearly not the point of the novel.

An immediately noticeable feature of Breakfast of Champions is its format, which is a major part of why it isn't a normal narrative novel. It consists of (mainly) short chapters, each a series of bullet points, rather like an extended Powerpoint presentation. In many of these, Vonnegut ironically describes the writing process for the book, comments on the actions and thoughts of the characters, and what he is trying to do; in others, Kilgore Trout's views and summaries of the science fiction stories are given. As if this isn't unusual enough, Vonnegut has provided a large number of illustrations, few of them particularly to the point; the text will in passing mention the Egyptian pyramids, say, and then continue, "they looked like this", followed by the author's line sketch. The effect, along with the quirky and satirical explanations of references which will be clear to any twentieth century human, is to make it seem that Breakfast of Champions is addressed to an alien race who know nothing of Earth culture. The writing style adopted by Vonnegut for the novel uses very basic and direct English, which reinforces this impression.

So what is the point? Breakfast of Champions is a satirical attack on the culture, ideas, and concerns which shaped America in the seventies; that is clear from the opening pages, which consist of an attack on the American national anthem, described as "gibberish sprinkled with question marks". This may sound like nothing more than a deliberate attempt to offend or shock, and I would agree that the placing of this passage at the very opening of the novel seems to be just that. There must have been many Americans who did not read past page two because of this onslaught. But Vonnegut is making the point that a song abut a flag is not really a sound basis for pride in a nation: without other achievements, the stars and stripes are completely meaningless except to arrant sentimentalists. Throughout the novel, nostalgia, optimism, and even rationalism are attacked.

Vonnegut deals with the major concerns of Breakfast of Champions more conventionally, and to my mind more convincingly elsewhere. The idea that our actions are fixed and meaningless is a major part of Timequake, while here it is conveyed by the continual interjections about the how the author has made the decisions which determine the actions of his characters combined with speculation about whether our actions are similarly controlled by our Creator. Similarly, Galapagos examines the idea that the human capacity for rational thought does not make us happier or the world a better place.

Breakfast of Champions has been compared to Voltaire's Candide, and there are many parallels between the two novels. Both are satirical, attacking prevalent optimistic ideas about the world - in Voltaire's case with the memorable phrase, "All the for the best in the best of all possible worlds", which is the teaching of Candide's tutor's Pangloss. By contrast, Trout thinks that "there was only one way for the Earth to be: the way it was": a pessimistic justification for the same thought, that the world cannot be improved.

In both cases, liberties are taken with narrative: in Candide, terrible things happen to the characters, including death, only for them to appear later apparently unscathed. Both Candide and Trout are quite passive, as the philosophies they hold suggest they should be, Trout relegating himself to a life as a passive observer of the follies of seventies America, from the adult movie theaters of New York, to the signs reminding those entering Philadelphia that its name makes it the city of brotherly love, to the devastation of West Virginia by mining. Both authors use a distinctly ironic style, Vonnecgut more overtly than Voltaire. The biggest difference is that there is no major character in Breakfast of Champions with the naivete of Candide himself, and this ultimately makes Vonnegut's novel far less appealing and amusing.

This is the sort of book which by its idiosyncratic nature and satirical ambitions attempts to walk a narrow path between black comedy and irritating eccentricity for the sake of it. Even though, as a non-American apart from anything else, there is nothing in Breakfast of Champions I would personally consider offensive, I generally found it much more irritating than funny. I like Vonnegut generally, but not this time - 3/10.

Kurt Vonnegut: Bagombo Snuff Box (1999)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1999
Review number: 1051

Even relative to the generally cavalier attitude to stories of many short story writers at the time, Vonnegut must have been exceptional in his carelessness. In fact, he lost track of where some of his stories had been published, and the ones collected here were tracked down by Peter Reed. Some of the stories published here have been quite extensively rewritten, apparently, and all of them have been lost for over thirty years.

Vonnegut is generally considered a science fiction author, yet only a couple of the twenty four stories in the collection could be classified in this genre. (Fans of his from the genre will probably be rather disappointed by Bagombo Snuff Box as a result.) Most of them are set in midwest America, and the theme that a lot of them have is pretence - particularly maintaining or creating a facade of superiority. People return to their home towns after years away, and try to pass themselves off as more successful than they are. Many are amusing, and all are written in the simple yet effective style typical of Vonnegut's work. He seems to have abandoned short story writing following the collapse of many of the American magazines which published them in the early sixties with less regret than other writers, and the sameness of these stories is perhaps indicative that they were not to be the field in which he would produce his best writing. Bagombo Snuff Box is interesting, but not great.

Kurt Vonnegut: Galapagos (1985)

Edition: Flamingo, 1994
Review number: 913

It would, I think, be fair to describe just about all of Vonnegut's writing as cynical about human achievement and particularly about twentieth century Western civilization. Galapagos is his most misanthropic novel, with nothing positive to say about "big brained" humanity.

The narrator of Galapagos is a ghost, of a son of Vonnegut's fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout. He tells the story of a calamity which strikes humanity in 1986, which eventually leads to the extinction of all the human race except those descended from a small group shipwrecked on the island of Santa Rosalia, most northerly of the Galapagos. (What happens to the several thousand people who live on the islands today he doesn't say.) Over the next million years, their descendants evolve into seal-like creatures with much smaller brains, greatly increasing the general level of happiness.

Vonnegut undermines his main point by spending almost all of the narrative describing the events leading up to the shipwreck and the main characters from the first generation of the island's inhabitants. Virtually nothing is said about their descendants, which is of course because they are much less individual and so less interesting. Describing the first generation also allows the narrator to make many caustic comments from his perspective, looking back from a million years later.

While occasionally very funny, the novel novel spends rather too much time trying to hammer home the main point that people would be happier - if less interesting - if they had much smaller brains. Galapagos ends up being enjoyable but not as thought provoking as Vonnegut's best work.

Kurt Vonnegut: Timequake (1997)

Edition: Vintage, 1998
Review number: 834

In 1997, Vonnegut imagined that on February 13, 2001 there would be a timequake; the universe would revert to its position about ten years earlier, and the decade would be repeated exactly as before, with the massively important difference that everybody would remember what happened the first time around, but be powerless to change anything.

Vonnegut's novel is not a narrative of the ten year rerun. It is, instead, a series of commentaries on it, with all kinds of digressions. It is fairly obvious that this is going to produce a more interesting read than a straightforward narrative, especially as it enables Vonnegut to talk about individuals affected in different ways by the beginning and end of the rerun without having to describe experiences in between common to all. (Once someone has reacted to repeated past events with "Oh no, not again" and "Oh good, this again", there isn't a great deal left to say.)

Part of Timequake is autobiographical, little anecdotes from throughout Vonnegut's life, and another part is about Kilgore Trout, the author who is Vonnegut's alter ego in several of his novels. There is a description of them meeting, after the end of the rerun, which is a bizarre touch of irony (but typical of the author). Many of the stories about the two writers are extremely funny; this is one of Vonnegut's most obviously humourous novels.

Like all of Vonnegut's novels, however, Timequake also has something to say. It is about free will, fatalism, and apathy. It is about people living their lives on remote control, which is why the end of the rerun is greeted by accidents (as people driving cars don't realise that they need to be driving them proactively after years when thought and action are disconnected) and the by a syndrome akin to catatonia, Post Timequake Apathy, with people not knowing how to exercise free will. Vonnegut has been consistently suspicious of devices like TV which can reduce a person to a passive observer; he has campaigned against technological devices that he believes are dehumanising.

This was Vonnegut's last novel, as he wanted to retire, and it ends with a clambake attended by many of the people that he knew, or wanted to know, or lookalikes for some who were already dead. The guest of homour at this party is Kilgore Trout (not because of his writing but because of his behaviour when the rerun finished), and as a whole it provides a final ironical twist in a novel filled with them. Vonnegut was able to combine intellectual ideas with the most immediate humour, and Timequake is an excellent example of this talent.

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5 (1969)

Edition: Jonathan Cape, 1970
Review number: 291

Kurt Vonnegut's most famous novel is one of several American novels dealing in a more or less experimental way with the Second World War which came out in the sixties and early seventies. (Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are other notable examples.) The impetus behind this was presumably - consciously or unconsciously - the Korean and Vietnam Wars; the three novels mentioned are all anti-war, all have an anti-heroic element, all detail horrific actions against the innocent carried out by soldiers scarcely less innocent. It may be that it was only the climate brought about by the news coverage of Vietnam - which also contained these elements - that they felt it was possible to express what they thought of war. (The three books also share an autobiographical atmosphere, in among the exaggeration and tragic comedy, though this may be to do with the prose style. I don't know enough about the authors' own lives to say how much might have been based on their own war experiences.) Even so, both Heller and Pynchon used a stream of consciousness influenced style, and Vonnegut placed his stories in a series of clichés from pulp science fiction; none of them are straightforward narratives.

After an introductory section, apparently about how the novel came to be written, the reader is plunged a deeper level into the narrative. The lengthy subtitle of the novel takes images from both of these levels (the Children's Crusade, aliens from Trafalmadore) to make the book seem almost inexplicable - the opposite of the normal function of a subtitle. The main narrative is the story of Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist from New England. But it does not tell us his life story, or even concentrate on the war or the bombing of Dresden.

The non-linear temporal structure is simplified through the use of a science fiction cliché: Pilgrim has come loose from normal time. One minute he is experiencing becoming a prisoner of war in Germany in 1945, then he is at his daughter's wedding in the mid-sixties. The identification between Vietnam and the unheroic side of World War II is increased by Pilgrim's son's involvement in the later war.

A second science fiction cliché, the abduction of Pilgrim by the Tralfamadorans, is used to allow Vonnegut to comment on the absurdity of human culture; combined with the time travel, this is not confined to the period chronologically after the abduction.

The centre of Slaughterhouse 5, though, is the horrific effects of the bombing of Dresden by the Allies. Pilgrim was a POW confined in a former slaughterhouse in the city, hence the novel's title. Because the POWs happened to be underground at the time of the raid, they were among the few survivors. The biggest raid of the war, the bombing of Dresden and the firestorm that followed caused destruction and loss of life on a scale at least comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since it was entirely conventional bombs which were dropped, the survivors were spared the horrors of radiation poisoning, but it still amounts to one of the most serious military crimes of history: Dresden was not a target of any importance in the German war effort. Vonnegut's novel has come out of his reaction to this event, and it is a memorial which conveys at least some sense of the horror of what happened. That is why it is an important novel.