After a well-earned day off for Fall Reading Days on the 14th, we'll begin the downhill slide towards December with our sixth novel of the semester, Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973). It's a highly-polarizing book within the Vonnegut canon and even the author himself has mixed feelings about it, giving it the grade of C (only his two collections of scattered essays and the novel Slapstick got equal or lower grades) when evaluating his own work in 1981's Palm Sunday.
"Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel," a character observes in Don DeLillo's Mao II, and though it took him six tries to do so, he finally managed to tell his Dresden story on his own terms. Thus, just as the Shah of Bratpuhr asks EPICAC "what people are for" Vonnegut found himself questioning his purpose in the aftermath of the success of Slaughterhouse-Five. "After I finished Slaughterhouse-Five I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to," he told Playboy in 1973, and even several years before that friends and the media were speculating that he had jettisoned an early version of the novel and was done. That his marriage fell apart soon thereafter and his kids, now all grown up, were leaving home only added to the confusion as he approached his 50th birthday.
Reaching the half-century mark put things in perspective, however, and he reengaged with the novel as a means of "clearing his head of all the junk in there," including attachments to characters from earlier books (cf. Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, and in name only, Francine Pefko and Kashdrahr Miasma). Even Dwayne Hoover, the car salesman at the heart of the novel, is a re-adaptation of the original character design for Billy Pilgrim (the two novels started as parts of the same project). At the same time, we meet characters here who'll recur through later novels (he entire Hoover family, Fred T. Barry and his mother Mildred, Rabo Karabekian, the Maritimo brothers and even Kazak the dog), and through the creation of Midland City, OH (a counterpart to Illium, NY), Vonnegut set the stage for the latter half of his career: Deadeye Dick would be set there and it would come up in Bluebeard and Galápagos as well.
Beyond that, though, there's a more important catharsis at work, as age has made Vonnegut wiser, but also wearier in the process. As the idealism of the 60s gave way to 70s malaise, as Watergate eroded trust in public officials and Vietnam took more and more lives, and as racism (particularly the well-entrenched prejudices one might easily encounter in flyover America like Midland City) continued to be a divisive force, Vonnegut grew more disillusioned. He'd tried being rational, tried charming his audience with humor, and it hadn't worked, so now he'd be painfully frank and let the ugliness present in American culture be seen plainly.
That's a lot of baggage for one novel, and that's perhaps why it's been easy for me to leave this book off of the reading list until this semester. Still, it's an important book to recon with, and the rawest expression Vonnegut has to offer —going so far as inserting himself into the narrative — which is likely why for every reader that dislikes the book there's one who thinks it's his finest.
Here's our reading schedule for the novel:"Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel," a character observes in Don DeLillo's Mao II, and though it took him six tries to do so, he finally managed to tell his Dresden story on his own terms. Thus, just as the Shah of Bratpuhr asks EPICAC "what people are for" Vonnegut found himself questioning his purpose in the aftermath of the success of Slaughterhouse-Five. "After I finished Slaughterhouse-Five I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to," he told Playboy in 1973, and even several years before that friends and the media were speculating that he had jettisoned an early version of the novel and was done. That his marriage fell apart soon thereafter and his kids, now all grown up, were leaving home only added to the confusion as he approached his 50th birthday.
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| A Vonnegut self-portrait taken from Breakfast of Champions |
Beyond that, though, there's a more important catharsis at work, as age has made Vonnegut wiser, but also wearier in the process. As the idealism of the 60s gave way to 70s malaise, as Watergate eroded trust in public officials and Vietnam took more and more lives, and as racism (particularly the well-entrenched prejudices one might easily encounter in flyover America like Midland City) continued to be a divisive force, Vonnegut grew more disillusioned. He'd tried being rational, tried charming his audience with humor, and it hadn't worked, so now he'd be painfully frank and let the ugliness present in American culture be seen plainly.
That's a lot of baggage for one novel, and that's perhaps why it's been easy for me to leave this book off of the reading list until this semester. Still, it's an important book to recon with, and the rawest expression Vonnegut has to offer —going so far as inserting himself into the narrative — which is likely why for every reader that dislikes the book there's one who thinks it's his finest.
- Mon. October 17: preface to chapter 8
- Weds. October 19: chapters 9–14
- Fri. October 21: chapters 15–18
- Mon. October 24: chapter 19 to epilogue
And here, as usual, are some supplemental readings that might be of interest:
- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviews the novel for The New York Times: [link]
- Walter James Miller interviews Vonnegut, focusing on Breakfast of Champions in particular, on WNYC-FM in 1974: [link]
Here's a 92nd Street Y podcast featuring Vonnegut's first public reading from the novel three years before its publication:
Like Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions was turned into a film in 1999. Despite featuring an all-star cast, it doesn't have much to recommend it, as you can see from the trailer below. Nonetheless, Consequence of Sound's Blake Goble begs for a worthy remake of the film in a 2015 article: [link]
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