© National Observer, May 17, 1975. 14.22

Trout: "It is satirical, lewd, wise – all one could hope for."
By Walton R. Collins

From devotees of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, the name Kilgore Trout evokes a kind of wistful reverence. Trout, the favorite science-fiction author of a good many of Vonnegut’s fictional characters, is himself the antihero of Breakfast of Champions. One learns to know Trout through that book, but one can never know Trout’s own books, by the very nature of things.

Oh, no? Vonnegut fans can now sample Trout’s prose in Venus on the Half-Shell, an epic adventure in space, published by Dell in paperback.

So now that a Trout work is accessible to living readers, the question intrudes: Who is Kilgore Trout?

The odds are good that he is Vonnegut, but Vonnegut denies it. ''I am not the author of Venus on the Half-Shell,'' he declares. ''I receive no royalties from the book. I have no financial interest in it.''

Neither Vonnegut nor Dell has identified the ''real'' Trout, however, Vonnegut says he gave the author of Venus the right to publish the book and use the Trout name.

And yet.

There is evidence, external and internal, that Trout and Vonnegut must be the same person. The external evidence is thin but not insignificant.

There is, to begin with, a photograph of Kilgore Trout on the back of Venus. It is an ill-lit engraving of someone sitting at a typewriter and wearing a campaign hat, tinted glasses, and flowing beard. It looks very much like Kurt Vonnegut in a campaign hat, tinted glasses, and phony, flowing beard.

Then there is the matter of the publisher. Dell is the paperback division of Delacorte Press, Vonnegut’s publisher.

The internal evidence is more persuasive. You can’t read a dozen pages anywhere in Venus without becoming morally certain you’re reading Vonnegut. The style is unmistakable. The thought patterns, the plot construction, the use of language, the Weltanschauung – all straight Vonnegut.

Does this mean Vonnegut is dissembling when he denies? Call it, perhaps, schizophrenia.

But what about Kilgore Trout? Now that we have some of his prose at last, what can we say about it?

Trout is everything Vonnegut has implied he was. Venus tells of an earthman who survives a second and more devastating flood to wander the universe, seeking the answer to the riddle of life. The riddle is phrased in typically Vonnegutian terms: ''Why are we created only to suffer and die?''

The story is imaginatively satirical. It is lewd but not obscene. It is wise in a shallow sense. It is everything one could hope for from Kilgore Trout.

Oh, yes. The hero of Venus on the Half-Shell turns out to have his own favorite author, one Jonathan Swift Somers III, among whose works was a series of stories about a German police dog, Ralph von Wau Wau.

Somers figures as prominently in the Trout novel as Trout did in some of the Vonnegut novels prior to Breakfast of Champions. Get it?

One has an eerie feeling that he is standing in a hall of mirrors.

© National Observer: May 17, 1975