Word: midlands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...plot is simple enough. I am invited to the Midland City Festival of the Arts through the efforts of Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric millionaire with the handwriting of a fourteen-year-old, and incidentally, my only fan. After a rather roundabout trip I arrive, only to drive a Pontiac dealer, Dwayne Hoover, insane with the ideas from one of my books. You can imagine my horror; I had never even driven a Pontiac before, and besides, my books had always influenced people to do only one thing: cut out the dirty pictures my publishers put in them and then burn...
This is the story of Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer in Midland City, U.S.A. As Kurt Vonnegut explains on the opening page, Hoover is "on the brink of going insane." He has many reasons of the traditional kind: his wife went mad and killed herself by swallowing Drano; his hostile son is a homosexual who plays piano in a cocktail lounge; and his mistress, of whom he wants to know "what life is all about," suggests that the site across from their motel room would be a good place for him to buy her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken...
...life?") as a graffito in a New York movie-theater men's room, finds that he has no pen or pencil with which to write his answer: "To be/the eyes/and ears/and conscience/of the Creator of the Universe/you fool." Trout has been invited to give a speech at the Midland City Festival of the Arts, and he hitchhikes to Midland City. He arrives on the wrong side of town and wades through a polluted creek that leaves his feet sealed in a coating of liquid plastic. Defiantly nacreous-footed, he wanders on into the motel cocktail lounge where Dwayne Hoover...
...attacks two black kitchen workers, he attacks random acquaintances and random strangers, and we last see him being carted away, along with several of his victims, in an ambulance called the Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster Unit, and talking vaguely about the prospects of investing in health clubs. "The Midland City Festival of the Arts," Vonnegut concludes in one grand sentence, "was postponed because of madness...
...central character in his own novels, seems to conclude on an even grander destructive note, namely the destruction of his own fictional universe. "I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come," he tells his creation, Kilgore Trout, when they meet at Midland City. "Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career." It is, perhaps, the ultimate goal of every creator to prove his creation by destroying...