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Audie Award Finalist, Best Man Narrator, 2016 Breakfast time of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His repeating cast of personas and American landscape was possibly the most controversial of his cannon; it was noticed by many at the time to be always a unsatisfactory successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which possessed made Vonnegut's literary reputation. The center of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar figure very intentionally modeled on the knowledge fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact that Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews which was based upon his own infrequent relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout can be an itinerant wandering in one knowledge fiction convention to some other; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost, and ridiculous mid-American personas), and their intersection is the reason for the evocation of several others, familiar and new, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery. The central issue can be involved with intersecting and apposite views of certainty, and far of the narrative is filtered through Trout, who is neither certifiably crazy nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation. America, when this novel was published, was at the throes of Nixon, Watergate, and the unraveling in our treatment in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all this dysfunction (and a goofy, needy kind of anticipation, the irrational comfort given through the genre of knowledge fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual. Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated because of its bizarre aspects and became the basis of your Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.)
