Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is a rather depressing bit of business. It is the story of a writer and the trouble he causes all his creations, apparently to entertain himself. Though it is never really clear if the Creator is entertained or not. He seems as sad and pathetic as the characters whose strings he pulls. There is madness and mayhem and a lot of talk about bad chemicals and so on.
The book is written in an odd style, even for the great and odd Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions is about a number of unusual people who all end up at an Art Festival and one of them goes crazy and starts beating up everyone he cares about. Nothing really odd about that. But at some point, the narrator of the story plops himself down into the action. The Creator sits in the bar with his creations and listens to what they, even though he is making them say it. He talks about how he created all these people, the town, the new Holiday Inn and so on.
The term-and so on-is used ad nauseum in the book. There is also the odd habit of giving definitions for just about every common item mentioned in the book. A book is usually made out of paper and meant to be read, but in this case, the book being used was recorded and released on a CD. . .and so on. There is also the somewhat silly fascination of breast size, penis size, and what color everyone’s skin is. For example, a character will be introduced and we are then told that he is a black machine, has a penis 9 inches long and two inches in circumference, and he has very good teeth-thus proving that he is a criminal. Only the very good teeth part proves he is a criminal. Each character we met, we are given their varied and sundry measurements.
This may be a great book, or it may just be slightly beyond my current ability to fully comprehend. It is a rambling and pointless bit of business, which seems to prove, that most novels are in fact, rambling and pointless bits of business. . .and so on.
Stanley Tucci does a good job of reading Breakfast of Champions and adding the small nuances of character from time to time with the handful of people we meet have anything to say. It is mainly the author talking to us about how this bit in the story really happened and how this bit was made up and how he knew someone that really did have a 9 inch penis with a 2 inch circumference. As a general rule I am not a fan of books where the authors decide to insert themselves into the narrative, and I found this book a bit annoying at times.
A lot of stuff happens, events from the start of the book tie in with events at the end, people grow and change, for all it’s oddness, Breakfast of Champions is still mostly a normal novel. But like Escher making three dimensional images on two dimensional paper, the gag seems to be yes, it is a novel, and no it isn’t really.
And so on.
