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PH ILIP STEVICK
frequency is that you have never had it so good. Wolfe cannoJ see be–
yond the "chic" in middle-class radicalism, nor beyond the gamesman–
ship in confrontation (made into slick theater in "Mau-Mauing the
Flak-Catchers"). Hardly a vision to disturb the sleep of the proprietors
and managers. In many ways it is also their vision. Wolfe's revolution
changes nothing, inverts nothing, in fact is
after
nothing but status.
It
is
full of half-baked versions of ideas in currency. The best that might be
said for it is that it is a put-on_ But I doubt it. I think he is dead serious.
Alan Trachtenberg
VOICE AND VISION
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. By Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Delacorte
Press/Seymour Lawrence. $7.95.
THE DEVIL TREE. By Jerzy Kosinski. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich .
$6.95.
EXTERMINATOR! By William S. Burroughs. The Viking Press. $6.95.
Kurt Vonnegut's
Breakfast of Champions
is more provocative
as a straw in the wind than a work of literature.
It
has almost no narra–
tive interest, almost no "solidity of specification," almost no moral com–
plication, and almost none of the inside-dopesterism characteristic of
books that sell very well; yet it has sold not merely well but best. What it
does have is play, wit, structural unpredictability, some ingenious
mimicry of American speech, and an absurdist vision continuous with
Vonnegut's previous work, though here with a different tonal range.
It
seems to me possible that our literary sociology is changing in some ways
that are not yet clear and that Vonnegut's rather unpretentious book, so
astonishingly different from any previous bestseller, may mark the begin–
ning of a different and wider public for new, unconventional fiction.
Vonnegut's principal strategy is to contrive the voice of a naif,
which in his case is the voice of a fifty-year-old na:if. "Everybody in
America," the narrator tells us, "was supposed to grab whatever he could
and hold onto it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and hold–
ing, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn't get their hands on
doodley-squat." Elsewhere the mention of a Colonel Sanders franchise
evokes the following explanation. "A chi cken was a fli ghtless bird which
looked like this: [Vonnegut here inserts his own drawing of a ch icken,
apparently done with a felt-tip pen, in the style of a child's coloring
