Breakfast of Champions

By: Kurt Vonnegut

Narrated by: John Malkovich

Audie Award Finalist, Best Male Narrator, 2016

Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact that Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and that was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost, and stupid mid-American characters), and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery. The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout, who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation.

America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate, and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual. Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects and became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.)

Download the accompanying reference guide.©1973 Kurt Vonnegut (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Funny..., Even if Malkovich Could Not Care Less

This book is amusing enough if you've enjoyed other Vonnegut works, and even uproarious at times regardless of whether you've ever read Vonnegut. And yet, I couldn't help feeling like a newcomer to a succession of inside jokes, or to a running gag that only Vonnegut devotees get. I think this insider-feeling to the novel is one reason why Vonnegut graded this book a "C" in hindsight.

I was peeved at John Malkovich's narration, particularly since it was the clincher in buying this audiobook. In steely staccato, he speed read through this book with an unrivaled indifference.

By comparison, I've found other renowned actors' narrations have exceeded my expectations; for example, Maggie Gyllenhaal's reading/acting of The Bell Jar, Tim Robbins of Fahrenheit 451, Richard Armitage of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and Jennifer Connelly of The Sheltering Sky. I guess that's the difference between really caring and just cashing in.

two comments

1) Vonnegut speaks honestly about relevant social issues without being sanctimonious.

2) Malkovich says "doodely-squat" and "wide-open beavers" beautifully and its everything you could hope for.

Loved it!

This was my first Kurt Vonnegut novel (not the conventional one to start with, I know) but it is the best novel I've listened to all year. John Malcovich is the perfect reader for this piece as well. Bravo! Excellent overall.

Echoes of Inspiration & Signs of Fatigue

Which character – as performed by John Malkovich – was your favorite?

Malkovich is flat out brilliant here (and elsewhere, of course). His tone is perfect, a mixture of amusement and undersold disdain.

Just as good, though, is his solution for a central problem of the novel: this is, after all, an illustrated book. Whenever Malkovich gets to a picture, he simply ad-libs a quick description. It's so flat, and so consistently funny, that I preferred hearing his dismissive descriptions to the illustrations themselves, many of which I remember from when I read (and re-read) this in the 1980s.

Any additional comments?

I read everything Vonnegut had written when I first got into him in high school more than 30 years ago. A lot of it was still fairly new then, and I felt pretty good about myself for reading stuff that felt like the sign of a serious collegiate thinker. I’ve made it a kind of project to revisit it over the last few years to see if it holds up, and the verdict has been, for the most part, yes. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat’s Cradle are still really satisfying. They’re novels that raise some heavy ideas in the guise of light comedy, and they tell stories that become compelling the longer they go.

If those other, more polished novels didn’t exist, I’d give Breakfast of Champions a higher rating. As it is, though, a lot of what makes this one memorable comes to us more skillfully in those others. This has some intriguing and memorable sections. “What kind of a man turns his daughter into an outboard motor” is still funny, still as outrageous as when I first got it as a youth swimmer myself.

But large portions of this seem mannered, seem almost as if they are Vonnegut trying to imitate Vonnegut.

Kilgore Trout may be a striking figure in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, but here he is largely a projection of Vonnegut feeling sorry for himself. At his best, he brings a Bukowski seediness, but by the end, he runs out of gas. At the risk of spoiling something, he winds up in conversation with Vonnegut himself, part of the novel as a character, in an exchange that seems almost an admission that Vonnegut has written himself into a corner.

Some of the tropes get old as well. I get the insight that humans as “meat machines” is sardonic and cynical, but the ninth or tenth time we get the size of someone’s penis or a woman’s bust/waist/hip measurements, the joke gets old. Too much of this is recycled, too much Vonnegut trying to recapture something he’s dealt with earlier.

All that said, there are still many joys here. This novel comes at the end of Vonnegut’s best run, and there’s a boldness to it – especially at the beginning – that you can’t ignore. Even if it reassembles earlier successful characters, it announces itself as a radical experiment in cynicism and despair. It’s dark in an earned way, an effort to figure out what’s left when you’ve decided there’s nothing left to say. Still, bottom line, I can’t help feeling this is likely where Vonnegut ‘jumped the shark,’ where he went from being one of the real voices of his generation to a man who could no longer quite find the form for his idealistic pessimism, for his sense that we human beings are squandering the remarkable existence we’ve been granted.

Twelve Pointed Asterisk Drawing

Any additional comments?

Best part is John Malkovich's description of the drawings. I did that thing where you are listening to something funny in a quiet room and you laugh, but then when the laugh is half-way out you realize that you are in a quiet room and so you stifle the laugh, and the combined pressure turns into a loud laugh-sneeze that blows snot out of your nose and coats everything in your immediate vicinity.