Dwayne Hoover, a Midwestern automobile salesman, with a troubled marriage, meets Vonnegut’s famous character, the hack writer, Kilgore Trout, on the eve of Trout’s receiving the Nobel Prize. Filmed in 1998 with Bruce Willis, this is another of Vonnegut’s savage satires of middle American values and their racketeering.

The New York Times – Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

You have to hand it to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. In his eighth novel, Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday, he performs considerable complex magic. He makes pornography seem like any old plumbing, violence like lovemaking, innocence like evil, and guilt like child’s play. He wheels out all the latest fashionable complaints about America–her racism, her gift for destroying language, her technological greed and selfishness–and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful, and lovable, all at the same time. He draws pictures, for God’s sake–simple, rough, yet surprisingly seductive sketches of everything from Volkswagens to electric chairs. He weaves into his plot a dozen or so glorious synopses of Vonnegut stories one almost wishes were fleshed out into whole books. He very nearly levitates.

Publish Date : 1999-05-11