Word: vonnegut
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...biggest literary splashes of the month are likely to follow the launching of two long-awaited novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth. Both are to be published in mid-May. In other ways, too, they seem to be matched and curiously revealing pieces of American fiction (see following reviews). Both are profoundly American in style and subject: Roth's The Great American Novel, a satiric fantasy about a mythical baseball league; Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, a surrealist account of a car dealer in the Midwest. Vonnegut is the Erasmus of the black comedians, who feels life...
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...
...puts them into the sentences: "The daggered scoops drove heartily into each bale whoosh picked it up VZZZ carried it to the baths." He repeats words and sometimes even phrases in an effort to tie together ideas, though he is not as successful at it as Kurt Vonnegut. His connections do not possess the absurdity which enables Vonnegut to weave entirely distinct happenings into a master...
...precisely Vonnegut's back-of-the-comic-book approach to serious matters that led to his enormous popularity, especially with young readers. His novels are clear, simple, funny, humane and need hardly any explaining at all. His Dynamic Tension draws the beach bully and the runt who is getting sand kicked in his face toward the same bitter fate. Both will grow old, die and vanish in a universe that is 99.9% indifferent vacuum. There are no immortal souls in Vonnegut, only the soles of the feet which his Bokononists in Cat's Cradle warm by ritually flattening...
...enough of turning Vonnegut into literary scholarship. Space Daisy would do great service to a deserving writer if she filmed The Vonnegut Statement. She could borrow the Slaughterhouse-Five technique of running the film backward (the bombers suck up their bombs which regress to factory parts and finally harmless ores) and so rebury the "objective correlatives" and "eschatological imperatives" in the uncomplicated plea sures and meanings of the original novels...