Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
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The way popular culture works is tricky. It’s not exactly a well-oiled machine, although parts of it certainly like to act like it is. Behind the pilot fish shoals of critics and the trailer reaction videos and the gossip magazines, the heart of pop culture is an echo chamber. Or a swarm building a nest in an echo chamber. A hive mind, with a migraine, that doesn’t always agree with itself. It’s a Portuguese Man o’ War, trapped forever in separation anxiety, singing and dancing backwards in high heels.
The basic rule seems to be if that something new or vital or different comes along, it will garner some attention if it’s lucky. If it gets enough people saying it’s original and clever, it will begin to inspire some further new content, which will proudly and happily follow its footsteps. At the same, in order to make more money, other people will be pushed by their agents and the people they signed a contract with into trying to copy the same formula and hop on the band wagon. Then, ideally, they’ll be able to take the band wagon over and cover it in advertising for their employer’s friend’s companies. They will also say words like ‘sequel’ and ‘series’ and ‘saga’, and if they’re very lucky they’ll do it all with a straight face.
Another way to put this is this - whenever I read Kurt Vonnegut, which isn’t as often as I’ve been told it should be, I find myself recognising the copies and inspirations of his work I’ve that already read or watched or played through. The true inspirations, that is, and the mainstream photocopies. All of which makes his work feel a little dustier, through no fault of his own. Call it the John Carter Expectation Dilemma. That especially happens when I’m reading one of Vonnegut’s shorter books. The shorter books, with their shorter chapters. His mosaics, I think he called them.
It’s hard not to see Chuck Palahniuk in the rhythms and shock value, for certain. Or Geoff Ryman’s Lust. Or some of Michael Marshall Smith’s novels. It’s hard not to see so much interesting, indie sci fi cinema in his forever blossoming, eye raising ideas. Even something like 2021’s Lapsis or the trophy collecting Everything Everywhere All at Once feel like they’re carrying a strand or two of Vonnegut’s DNA. It's hard not to see Philip K Dick’s truly cosmic strangeness jostling at the edges of Vonnegut’s wry, often more grounded stories. Well maybe not grounded. But they’re certainly earthed. Safe to touch. Whereas some of Dick’s stories feel designed to have you no longer trusting your reflection, let alone the view outside your window.
I know I’ve read Slaughterhouse Five at some point. I just can’t remember when. I know the hype basically killed it for me. I know I read Mother Night last year, after listening to the first series of the fantastic BBC radio show The Exploding Library. I had heard bits of Breakfast of Champions a few years ago. Sitting at my desk at work, running out of things to listen to which would distract me from the aforementioned work.
That was where I found an edited version read by Vonnegut himself. It was the first time I heard his voice. It helped me make sense of those short, almost primary coloured sentences he uses a lot of the time. Although, something in that dry delivery of his conjured William Burroughs back into my head. It was more city than country, however. More stoic than preacher. But there it was. That madness intended to shock an audience who liked their picket fences (and a lot of other things) white.
So, Breakfast of Champions, I hear you cry. And it’s a fair question. And it’s a hell of a book. It’s not a grab you at page one type of book. Not for me, anyway. Vonnegut’s little chapters have always felt pointless to me. It’s like trying to chew confetti. I often wonder he didn’t just string the larger portions together like Pratchett did with his * * * * * breaks.
But, Breakfast of Champions has something over the other Vonnegut books I’ve read – it’s longer. So, sure, the first 100 pages left me feeling a little distant from the simple premise of the story and a lot of the tangents he goes off on, but you’re not over halfway through the book yet. So, there’s time to settle in. He’s also occasionally employing a brilliant device, prefiguring what’s about to happen. You keep hearing little glimpses, little flash forwards, of how this will all end. And it will end badly. Road signs countdown to a cave filling with chemical bubbles. A man losing his mind gets closer and closer to the place where he’s going to meet the man who will finally push him over the edge with nothing more than an idea, along with some of the people we’ve heard he’s going to hurt. It’s a very suburban apocalypse that’s waiting for us, and Vonnegut takes great pleasure in reminding us, with every page turned, that we’re getting close to ground zero. It’s also rather typically Vonnegut that he’s standing somewhere across from us, outside of time, moving us forward and backwards.
Vonnegut is also clearly not trying to hide his working here. He puts little drawings throughout the story, where he doesn’t want to spend time describing something. It’s maybe not as charming to me as he thinks it is, but it helps sets that strange, essayist, text book tone he’s going for. Meanwhile, the great, alien enemy in this movie is America. Not just modern America. No, he tracks it back. He checks in on the Civil War. He talks about Lincoln. He talks about slaves. He talks about the native American tribes. He has truck drivers and waitresses discussing the horrors of a modern life. He goes after advertising. Companies are given grand and inappropriate names because it sounds good. He brings back his own past characters to populate the sketchbook/lecture he’s building, which is all hinged on the rather unfortunate moment where one man is going to lose control of his sanity. I guess, if you can live with the pragmatism and sarcasm, I can see the appeal. Vonnegut has taken a very simple moment of reality colliding with fantasy, then he just keeps exploding it, examining the wreckage, pushing it further and further. Digging in the debris of his head, his heart, and his country. He’s got our attention once we open the book, so he’s not going to waste the opportunity to talk to us about everything. In a sense, it almost makes Breakfast of Champions feel like some grand, sacrificial gesture. He’s piling up the past, ready to strike the match.
The problem is all those people who’ve come after him. I’ve encountered a lot of stories, in a lot of forms, which had clearly taken some influence from Breakfast of Champions. The crisis in the head of the ageing man. The dangers of fiction and ideas when they’re released into the world. The small town prison. The road trip through desolation. The curious, universal asides. America, the greedy. Reading Breakfast of Champions in the 21st century, you find that someone has already played its winning hand of cards, more than once.
It’s also not quite as wild as I think it used to be. It shares that honour with a lot of dusty modern classics. They came, they broke the mould. The new mould then got passed around for mass production. Still, there’s no denying the sheer gravitational force of the mind behind this ramble. Vonnegut is firing on every cylinder he has here, as often as he can. Which leaves it feeling scattershot more than once. And, at times, the story gets in the way of the idea he’s trying to plant in our brains.
At other time, he’s sitting in the story himself, which throws the pace under the bus, along with pretty much any hope you have of suspending your disbelief. He is dismantling the illusion of the novel around you, switching it on and off, giving characters a reason to leave him alone. Well, every character apart from a dog.
Joseph Heller might’ve borrowed a little of that thinking for his final book, The Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. Which makes sense seeing as Vonnegut as a champion for his second book, Something Happened - which is another disintergrating American man story.
Charlie Kaufman feels like he’s taken a large swig from a Breakfast of Champions before tackling his first book, Antkind. That weird, tangled meta labyrinth of a debut proved it’s not easy taking a novel apart when people are reading it.
Recently, I also tried Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. A book that choked on its own pretentiousness as far as I was concerned, but is hailed by pretty much everyone else as revolutionary work. I just felt like I’d seen it done better. A lot better. And with a lot more entertaining stories. If there’s one thing I will give Breakfast of Champions it’s that Vonnegut wasn’t constantly elbowing me in the ribs and asking me if I thought he was clever. No, he was far too busy for that.
Did I like Breakfast of Champions then? Yes. Would I read it again? Probably not. Is it my favourite Vonnegut book? So far, yes, although I’ve got a long way to go, and I’m not sure I like saying a book works better because of the page count.
Do I think it’s as good as the hype kept telling me? No. Sorry, but no. It’s undeniably clever. It’s a high wire act at times, where you just find yourself wondering how much further he can push things. It’s also hampered by some clunky gear shifts, it’s loaded with dated language, and it’s sacrificing a lot of what keeps most people reading in order to tell us what’s wrong with the world we live in. It’s funny and smart, yes, but if this book was someone you found yourself sitting next to it on the train, you might start looking for another seat after a few stops, just to be able to take a break or check if you were already trapped in a Vonnegut novel, about to bite someone’s finger off.
And so on.