Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Reviewed by Guy Portman
Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy, mentally unstable Pontiac salesman. Kilgore Trout is a little-known Sci-fi author. Trout has been invited to make a keynote address at an art festival in Hoover’s hometown of Midland City. The pair are destined to meet. The story shifts between Trout, Hoover, several supporting characters, and the author himself.
What the book lacks in plot, it makes up for in farcical, cartoonish content, which is effectively employed to satirise and ridicule American society. Targets include, but are not limited to, war, race and capitalism.
Breakfast of Champions is an experimental, subversive and multi-layered tragi-comedy with an unusual narrative structure. Although this reader was left baffled by this unusual book, he was enthralled by its shrewd social commentary.
