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jakepcole 's review for:
Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
For all of the actual sci-fi elements of Vonnegut's work, I admire that most of his trippy, speculative style comes from writing about quotidian details as if addressing an extraterrestrial reader that might need helpful explainers and illustrations of the most basic objects and human concepts, making even the simplest things foreign. Breakfast of Champion does this more than most of his books, largely making the plot incidental to question all the various personal and social forces that shape people even as all of this is nested within a larger meta game of Vonnegut acknowledging that he is the one shaping his characters toward their doom. But I do somewhat agree with the author's own mixed retrospective assessment. The unstuck-in-time jumble is not nearly as effective here as it is in Slaughterhouse-Five, and for all his clever play with both the internal and overriding mechanics of how an artist might affect others, he leaves a gaping hole where one would expect him to unpack the larger morality of how authors pile their creations with drama solely for their own amusement and ambition. Thus it feels like a half-complete satire, one that does a good job at poking fun of America's irreconcilable foibles in Twainian fashion but falls short of its more autocritical aims.