Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. “Breakfast of Champions,” 1973, Delacorte Press, 303pp.

This is my second Vonnegut book. I felt I should try a second after my disappointment with the first, there will not be a third. Vonnegut is now dead and probably relived from what I surmise was a depressing outlook on life—that is sure what comes across in his fiction. My four year old grandson summed it up. “What are you drawing, Leo,” I asked. “The earth and planets,” he answered. “Why is the paper black?” “Because the earth is dirty.” If you understand Leo, you can skip the book.

Breakfast of Champions tells the story of the events that lead up to the meeting of Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, the meeting itself, and the immediate aftermath. Trout is a struggling science fiction writer who, after their fateful meeting, becomes successful and wins a Nobel Prize; Hoover is a wealthy businessman who is going insane, sent over the brink by his encounter with Trout and so on, as Vonnegut would likely say.
Whence the title? Pg. 199: “Bonnie made a joke now as she served him his martini. She made the same joke every time she served anybody a martini. ‘Breakfast of Champions,’ she said.” (Note: that is the first time I ever used the word “whence,” If no such word exists, it should.)

Some interesting excerpts:
Pg. 2: “She wrote this ad for an end-of-the-summer sale on summer hats: ‘For prices like this, you can run them through your horse and put them on your roses.’”
Pg. 28: “And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: ‘Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.’”

Pg. 58: “…He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.” (Why does this remind me of Congress?).

Pg. 214: “You know what truth is?’ said Beatrice. “It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah—ain’t it the truth?’”

Pg. 246: “The planet was ball-shaped. Nobody knew why we didn’t fall off, even though everybody pretended to kind of understand it. The really smart people understood that one of the best ways to get rich was to own a part of the surface people had to stick to.” (And these smart people could then enforce their property rights and keep everyone else off. They could sell them helium balloons, which they would have to buy, so they could float above the surface and not trespass.)