Word: pontiacs
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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 STORY HAS more to it than just my unscrewing the last bolt out of some Pontiac dealer's engine. My creator has silly ideas, which, despite their sometimes tenuous connection to the story, he never fails to explore. Many of his ideas are social criticism derived from the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of American experience. In the past, there were funny. I was funny. But when I'm not bored by Breakfast of Champions, it makes me want to cry. I'm just not funny anymore...
...Pontiac showroom for the scene of such collisions? "Pontiac is the leading middle-class car," Vonnegut told an interviewer some time ago. "But Pontiac is also the name of an Indian chief. The name is like a survey of American history...
...intersection. Not long after that, Dwayne was walking across his asphalt parking lot when his bad chemicals made the asphalt give way beneath him. He thought he was sinking into a kind of "shallow, rubbery dimple." He climbed from dimple to dimple toward the office in his Pontiac showroom. The ground was steady there, but he could not understand why the place was full of plastic palm trees. His bad chemicals had made him forget that this was Hawaiian Week. Then he saw his sales manager approaching in a grass skirt and a pink T shirt that said "Make Love...
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...