Kurt Vonnegut's seventh novel, published in 1973 as a present to himself on his fiftieth birthday, brings two men toward a collision in the fictional Midwestern town of Midland City. Kilgore Trout is an aging science fiction writer whose hundreds of books have been published almost exclusively as filler in pornographic magazines; he is invited, to his own bewilderment, to speak at the Midland City Arts Festival. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy Pontiac dealer, a pillar of the town, and the survivor of a marriage that ended when his wife drank Drano. Dwayne is going insane, and nobody around him has noticed.
They meet at the festival's cocktail lounge. Dwayne reads a Trout novel arguing that its reader is the only creature in the universe with free will and that everyone else is an unfeeling machine, believes every word of it, and goes on a rampage through the people closest to him. Around that thin plot Vonnegut assembles a portrait of America in its bicentennial decade: the strip malls and Holiday Inns, the poisoned rivers, the casual and total racism, the sexual misery, the guns, the money. He interrupts constantly to define ordinary objects as if for a reader who has never seen the country, and illustrates the book himself in deliberately crude felt-tip drawings.
The novel's real subject is the author. Vonnegut writes himself into the story as its Creator, sitting in the lounge behind mirrored sunglasses to watch his own characters, and closes by releasing them from his service — Kilgore Trout above all, who calls after him in his father's voice, asking to be made young. Deliberately plain in its sentences and radically strange in its shape, "Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday!" is Vonnegut clearing out the machinery of his earlier books in public.
