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Interview
The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut
The author of "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" talks about Capote and Kerouac, Hillary and Rudy, television and, of course, the end of the world.
By Frank Houston
[10/08/99]

Reviews
"Assuming the Position" by Rick Whitaker
A onetime hustler takes a long, hard look at the Life.
By Dennis Drabelle
[10/08/99]

Ivory Tower
"The Iliad" and other tales of war
My momentous monologue turns to dust under the scrutiny of a well-prepared student.
By David Alford
[10/08/99]

Ivory Tower
Nerds with cards
Mensa is overhauling its brainiac image -- with a guide to gambling.
By Leah Hoffmann
[10/08/99]

Biography as screenplay
Edmund Morris has conceived the life of Ronald Reagan as a movie. And it's a bomb.
By Charles Kaiser
[10/07/99]

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And, of course, Vonnegut's career has been too buoyantly successful to be cult-worthy. His pleasing Saturday Evening Post-style short fiction was published widely in the 1950s. In 1952, "Player Piano" got some critical attention. After "Mother Night" and "Cat's Cradle" in 1963, Vonnegut became a truly popular writer. With "Slaughterhouse-Five" in 1969 and "Breakfast of Champions" in 1973, his work became the object of academic scrutiny. But the professoriate that embraced Vonnegut did so insolently, proud of their leap across the low art-high art divide. Now, after three decades in which those hierarchies have been demolished, readers -- and his latest filmic interpreter, Alan Rudolph -- tend to forget that Vonnegut was once a "paperback writer," someone considered sub-literary, whose books were published first in paperbacks aimed at a mass-market audience.

With this latest film, Rudolph has taken "Breakfast of Champions" all too seriously, turning the sort of insouciant love that once fueled Vonnegut scholarship into a brow-furrowed faith in Vonnegut the great artist. In the preface to the novel, Vonnegut calls the book his 50th birthday present to himself, and thus the book is even more fun, winking and infantile than the average Vonnegut creation. "I am programmed at 50 to perform childishly," he writes. "To give an idea of the maturity of my illustrations for this book, here is my picture of an asshole." An asshole is then represented by an asterisk.

Where Vonnegut is nonchalant, Rudolph's film is rigid and grandiose. As the enigmatic Kilgore Trout, Albert Finney is a humorless, Andy Rooneyesque shaman. Bruce Willis, as alienated suburban car dealer-gone-madman Dwayne Hoover, goes at his role with such moral self-importance he clearly thinks he's hitting the floorboards for Faust.

"Breakfast of Champions," the novel, rejects the trappings of fine art absolutely. Vonnegut has no time for moral uncertainty, difficult language or heavy allusions. And he understands what he has rejected. Indeed, he self-consciously satirizes his paperback-writer status. In the novel, Kilgore Trout's high-minded writings are inappropriately jacketed in pulp fiction covers that feature well-endowed co-eds, a wry and self-pitying comment on Vonnegut's own lowly mass-market position. In the movie, this same set piece doesn't work, because the film is ignorant of the difference between high and low literary culture, and of Vonnegut's own compromised position between them.

That's not to say that Vonnegut was ever an outsider of Kilgore Trout-ian proportions. As critic Jerome Klinkowitz notes, Vonnegut was always a middle-class spokesman, despite his epochal countercultural stylings. After all, what's more middle-class than a dislike of experts and intellectuals?

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