Thin gruel for Vonnegut fans

The film "Breakfast of Champions" misses the point: What "Bokononists" love is Father Kurt's smart anti-intellectualism.

By Alissa Lara Quart

Oct 8, 1999 | "Breakfast of Champions," the movie, is unwatchable, a mesh of op-art shots and A-list actors straining to play small-town kooks. But that won't stop people from going to see it -- the kind of people who would spend $1,800, the going price, for the first paperback edition of Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, "Player Piano," published in 1952.

Two decades after the writer's prime, his cult is still going strong. They create Vonnegut home pages, steep themselves in Vonnegut family lore, buy the 693-page "The Vonnegut Encyclopedia." They play in Vonnegut homage bands like Deadeye Dick and Kilgore (after Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's sad-sack alter ego). And while Vonnegut's young followers will no doubt do director Alan Rudolph the favor of seeing his film "Breakfast of Champions," Rudolph has no idea what it is that draws them to the man they call "Father Kurt." Mistaking Vonnegut for the sort of literary writer whose books are meant to be made into prestige films, Rudolph shows himself to be the kind of artiste Vonnegut would ignore, or, if he could work up the energy, flip the bird to.

Vonnegut's fans look to him to satisfy their desire for a permissive patriarch. They trust his books because in each of them they find the author's own old-fashioned cantankerous Midwestern persona. His books' prologues are often signed by that immutable wise fool "K.V." In the prologue to "Jailbird," he tells folksy stories about his hometown, Indianapolis, and recalls fighting World War II. "Slaughterhouse Five," which takes place partially in Dresden -- where Vonnegut was a POW -- is introduced by K.V.'s recollections of teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, getting into "perfectly beautiful trouble" while he was "working on a book about Dresden." K.V. colludes with his readers in their hatred of cold adults: In "Jailbird," for instance, K.V. notes that Kilgore Trout "could not make it on the outside." But, he says reassuringly, "that is no disgrace. A lot of good people can't make it on the outside." Vonnegut offers himself, Father Kurt, as the salve for his readers' hurts -- a forgiving paterfamilias and an angry teenager wrapped in one.

Literary fashions may change, but Vonnegut's gently misanthropic voice, Pall Mall-hoarse, stays true. His heroes are almost always those excluded from any successful clique. Howard W. Campbell Jr., the American spy/Nazi speechifier of Vonnegut's best novel, "Mother Night," is a better man because he has fallen out of the cruel, hypocritical world of adult busyness. After the war, Campbell suffers and pines alone in his room, his only human activity playing chess: Vonnegut's ostensibly grown characters almost always resemble lonely adolescent boys. And thus boyish but grownup readers are as flattered by the books as they were 30 years before. According to Vonnegut's literary calculus, underdeveloped loners are far superior to mature super-professional phonies.

Next Page: Vonnegut is no great literary artist -- and wouldn't want to be

• View blog reactions