[Breakfast of Champions] is almost a deliberate curiosity, an earnest attempt to play after getting Dresden out of the way. It's filled with Vonnegut's cartoon drawings of items mentioned in the text; it plays the whimsical game of pretending that we know nothing about life on earth … and it delivers many straight-faced criticisms of Life…. He indulges in some obligatory no-no's: he talks about Niggers, he draws a vagina, he gives penis measurements of most of the male characters (but fudges about his own). (p. 26)

Well, all this—and the funny names and the slapstick events—is less amusing than it ought to be. The characters are still stick figures, still listless playthings; but the "enormous forces" are now reduced to Vonnegut himself, who wanders through his novel like Ed Sullivan through reruns of his Sunday nights—creating characters, endowing them with nonce pasts and qualities, hurting or...