A Question Of Quality

I'm still puzzling over what to make of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Completing the novel did nothing to change my mind about it being in general terms a poor work, both in terms of Vonnegut's oeuvre and any reasonable assessment of the quality of novels in broader terms. There's a lacerating segment in Chapter 18 in which Vonnegut himself makes no bones about this, (if I'm reading the sequence correctly) at the point in the novel when the writer himself is established as an on-going presence in whatever plot is taking place:

'This is a very bad book you're writing,' I said to myself behind my leaks.
'I know,' I said.
'You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did,' I said.
'I know,' I said.

It's almost as if the writer can no longer be bothered to keep up the pretence of the fiction, and this sense of weariness, of end-of-one's-tetherness pervades the work. I had a strong sense that the writing was coming out of a deep and debilitating sense of depression. And this depression is corrosive in nature. The satire is entirely destructive in an almost lazy manner.

And yet moments (like the above) are done so well that something survives the wreckage. It's just that I'm not sure that that something can fairly be described as a novel.

Now I could be wrong. My diagnosis of depression might be amateur psychoanalysing of the worse sort and entirely misplaced. I do know that Vonnegut did suffer from depression - and attempted suicide - later in life, but that's no reason for me to read that back into his earlier fiction. It could be that what he's doing in Breakfast is deliberate and calculated - intended to move away from what he'd already achieved, the perfection of Slaughterhouse 5, into new territory, expanding the possibilities of the novel as a form. And some of the comments on the work you can read in places like amazon.com are remarkably positive, suggesting it works for some readers.

That's good, I suppose. I don't want to impose my negativity on others and spoil the book for them. But I still think it's pretty poor stuff and wonder whether the writer was just riding on his reputation at that point in his career.