Breakfast of ChampionsOr Goodby Blue Monday

The great American satirist took his parting shots during the intermission. Kurt Vonnegut was not a linear guy. He was always blurting out his denouements in the opening pages, imagining his characters as complete family trees and claiming everything that ever happened is all happening at the same time. So it makes sense that he wrote Breakfast of Champions, a novel that would work so well as a grand finale, in the middle of his career.

Breakfast of Champions— in which a Pontiac dealer goes psycho after speed-reading a sci-fi story about how everybody but him is a robot — is a big, crazy concoction of everything Vonnegut did best: memorable mantras (“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane”), self-reference (the narrator isn’t just a character — he’s Vonnegut), hilarious/pointed satire (via unnecessary explanations of everyday things, like assholes and pyramids) and detached concern for all us stupid humans. Also includes appearances by sadsack hack Kilgore Trout, mad millionaire Eliot Rosewater and other recognizable characters from the Vonnegut canon.

And yet, for all the familiarity, there’s something more naked and devious at work in Breakfast of Champions. Like a drunk magician, the author pulls his off his signature tricks with flawless muscle memory, then lets slip how he did it. It’s a strange book, even for Vonnegut, complicated and grimly funny. If you don’t dig it, you’re a robot.