"As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books."
-Breakfast for Champions
Kurt Vonnegut finally goes full mental in this book. As usual, his writing is pessimistic, fatalistic, and deconstructive; excelling at caricaturing society, capitalism, America, and life and hope in general. In this book, he writes very personally, about his mother and his depression and his giving up on telling stories.
He mixes himself with his father to create Kilgore Trout, an old and unsuccessful sci-fi writer who talks to his parakeet and who prolifically publishes short stories in porn magazines amidst pictures of beavers, as he puts it. Kilgore ensues on a road trip across America to meet the other protagonist Dwayne Hoover, who’s also a depressed lonely old rich guy whose wife committed suicide, much like Vonnegut’s mother. On the first page of the book he mentions that these two parts of his are going to meet in the end, so stay tuned.
Kilgore shares much of Vonnegut’s resigned views on fate and time and things being the way they are as that’s the only way they could be. To escape this helplessness, in the entire span of the book, he makes up stories, constantly, relentlessly, fantastic stories, stories about aliens; a peek into Vonnegut’s whacky imagination.
Vonnegut likes to deconstruct everything, from slavery in America to the sordid lives of his fictional characters. In the book he even draws pictures (literally) of undergarments and assholes and apples and lambs and calligraphic fonts. He tunes up the level of absurdity and deconstructionism in the end, near the fateful encounter of his two heroes. By then the universe of the book no longer matters, all that matters are the characters.
It is the characters which are the stunning achievement of this book. Every character has an intricate backstory, there are no main characters, all characters are the main characters. Everyone is alive in the book even when you’re not reading about them. Everyone is hurt by some event in their past, everybody is sad in their own way. They all have small and large quirks, they all dream about silly things, and they are all uncontrollably adrift in the sea of life.
Read this book for the completely unpredictable writing, the extremely personal touch, a peek into Vonnegut’s mind and the dazzlingly flawed beauty of his characters.