As Much Protein as an Egg

The World of Kurt Vonnegut

by Seth Harwood

Artemis Kellog struggles to write his first screenplay, find love in San Francisco, and maintain his coffee consumption. Bainbridge McGee aspires to play golf, write his fourth Great American Novel, and dabble in the online dating scene. Each man is indebted to and inspired by Vonnegut, a passion that plays out as McGee works on his masterpiece and Kellog finds writing is his true religion. When they both land on a select committee tasked with choosing the winner of a prestigious sci-fi and fantasy writers award, the choice is clear-to them-and both become determined to ensure Vonnegut is honored with the award. At turns spellbinding, suspenseful, and full of love, this story comes down to the finish to reveal if, on science fiction's grandest stage, Vonnegut will be remembered with the appropriate reverence the master deserves.

180 pages, Paperback

First published February 18, 2014

About the author

Seth Harwood received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to build a large readership for his first novel, JACK WAKES UP, by serializing it as a free audiobook online. Currently audio versions of Harwood’s novels and stories have been downloaded over one million times.

He is the author of six additional novels: THE MALTESE JORDANS, EVERYONE PAYS, IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, CZECHMATE, THIS IS LIFE and YOUNG JUNIUS, as well as two collections of short stories, A LONG WAY FROM DISNEY and FISHER CAT. He has also written a novella in the world of Kurt Vonnegut dealing with the themes of time travel, writing, and fatherhood.

Harwood currently lives in western Massachusetts and is at work on a second Clara Donner novel.

He teaches creative writing and English classes at City College of San Francisco, Stanford Continuing Studies, and Harvard Extension. Other jobs throughout the years have included commodities floor trading clerk, bartender, copy-editor, rare book cataloguer, high school English teacher, basketball coach, and freelance journalist.

Reviews

[Robert McCaffrey]

Readers who know Seth Harwood from his Jack Palms crimewave series know he can write ghetto and gang talk like nobody else, but this little novella is in a different vein altogether. The story opens with a dissatisfied sixth-grade schoolteacher, Artemis Kellog, who decides to call in sick one day and sets out for a “coffee shop”—actually one of San Francisco’s trendy hipster cafes. He’s there ostensibly to drink coffee, but really to write for “Drinking coffee was the same as writing in San Francisco.” Artemis is distracted by a young app designer, Emily Plinko, but neither of them have any flirtation skills. Emily “had been on eleven dates using her old profile on Match.com and none of them had gone well.”

But what emboldens the insecure Artemis to introduce himself to Emily—who is so busy revising her match.com profile and checking out Facebook that she hardly notices him—involves a hipster barista, and a comically disgusting particle of dust—which Harwood mercifully spares Emily and Artemis from ever finding out about. And Harwood, the writer, is right there too, café sitting and writing-watching this romance unfold. The scene is quintessentially San Francisco, but San Francisco as if Vonnegut were writing it.

What ensues is a comical behind-the-scenes chase to influence the committee members of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award and to win a posthumous honor for Kurt Vonnegut, to rectify an old literary slight that will be well-known to many science fiction fans. And it’s a satire on the politics behind literary awards, generally, and should satisfy any reader who is skeptical or just curious about how such awards are decided.

Harwood takes a few pokes at “ironic” fashion and the hipster scene and makes some jabs at the contemporary art world too. Artemis is drawn to the minimalist painter Rabo Karabekian whose overpriced works decorate the café walls where he is courting Emily. Karabekian’s paintings are “basically just a canvas of one particular color with a line or two of another.” Artemis realizes that Karabekian’s paintings are so simple that inexpensive digital reproductions printed on canvas and ordered from Shutterfly.com would likely serve as well as the originals. Harwood seems to be asking why we continue to place such high value on original paintings as commodities in today's digital era where virtual images are often indistinguishable from their originals, and in a world where books have been mass-produced for centuries and are now even less tangible in their digital form, a medium which has gained almost immediate acceptance.

When Artemis attempts to describe to Emily the advanced civilization of the planet Tralfemadore—familiar to Readers of Slaughter House Five—he gestures to the Rabo Karabekian digital copies (or are they the originals?) on the café walls and explains, “Anything like this they dealt with a long, long time ago. They’ve had computers for about five thousand years. … Yes, they had already dealt with minimalist painting.”

For scene contrast, Artemis is summoned to make a car trip to an absurd gated golfing community in La Quinta, in that other parallel universe of southern California, where he is the guest of an important writer, Bainbridge McGee, a committee member who wants to sway the award for Vonnegut. McGee has written a long novel, The Falling People, about the 9-11 World Trade Center tragedy, and it is indeed a masterpiece. And the reader is treated to some superb excerpts. Harwood, as McGee, has taken what we know only as a collective horror from all too familiar graphic images and has humanized the victims by giving each an individual life—and an individual death. Seth Harwood imagines each victim’s most important memories flashing by at high speed in their final moments of consciousness before they hit the ground. The excerpts are poignant and written so beautifully and respectfully that we hope Harwood will give us the full novel someday. The Falling People is homage to the victims of 9-11 and to Vonnegut as well. Billy Pilgrim–again well known to readers of Slaughter House Five—gets unstuck in time, once again, and makes an appearance at Ground Zero where he can’t help but make comparisons to a parallel event, the Bombing of Dresden.

And then there is some absurdist comic relief. After staying awake all night reading the manuscript of The Falling People, Artemis is desperate for a cup of coffee in the early morning hours, but McGee’s coffee-making apparatus is so complicated that the timid Artemis won’t even approach it. Seth Harwood's little novella is full of endless satire, dry humor, and delicious bon mots like this, but Harwood is never supercilious or condescending about his characters. He seems to have genuine affection for all of them no matter how flawed. And I believe that is why his falling people are so convincing—they are never depicted in sentimental terms the way we have grown used to hearing of them, let us say from teary-eyed newscasters and documentarians who have made them all saints and angels even before they hit the ground—and thus have effectively dehumanized them. Harwood has made them like the rest ofus, which is to say, similarly ridiculous.

Here is the literary conundrum: can an author like Bainbridge McGee, a cad who lives a double life on match.com, obsessed like everyone else with getting laid, and who would actually rather be golfing than writing, really write a profound and sensitive masterpiece about something as difficult as 9-11 and Ground Zero, a subject which many authors avoid? In his “real” fictional life, McGee, after completing his masterpiece, is shown as callously indifferent to his girlfriend’s murder. Writers—even ones who produce great I masterpieces—are among the most absurd and flawed of personalities. And it is certainly no wonder that the literary scene is no sacred cow for Harwood.

You can enjoy this little page-turner as fun entertainment, because fun it is. But More Protein Than An Egg indirectly raises some profound questions about life, art and literature—if you choose to read it that way.

I live just uphill from Harwood’s hipster scene, and can vouch for Protein’s literary verisimilitude! If you live in San Francisco, head to a Valencia Street café with your e-book and order yourself a triple latte with a few extra shots and enjoy this caffeinated literary romp. And if you live in the burbs and only have Starbucks, well, there’s still hope for you. Just make yourself a big pot of coffee, sit down with your Kindle or iPad and download The World of Kurt Vonnegut/As Much Protein as an Egg. Get unstuck in time and place, and let yourself be transported Vonnegut-like to a real San Francisco café and beyond.

[Jeff B.]

This book was part of the "Kindle Worlds", a fan fiction division of Kindle, which has been shut down. Kindle Worlds licensed from Kurt Vonnegut's works from the Vonnegut estate and had a whole series call the WOKV, or World of Kurt Vonnegut. Like I said, Kindle Worlds was shut down and it seems to be impossible to find any of the WOKV books or short stories. This book seems to be the lone exception. I'm not sure why this book is still available. Maybe it's a mistake or maybe the author is just like, whatever. In any case, I was excited to be able to buy this. Here are my thoughts:

1. It's about 150 pages, according to my Kindle, and a quick and fun read. The whole book is very meta. It tell three stories about a young author, an older author (Kilgore Trout's son), and the story the older author is writing, which stars Billy Pilgrim at 9/11. The two authors are trying to get Kurt Vonnegut named to win an award that they are on the committee of.

2. It's chock full of Kurt Vonnegut references. Most of the references are to Slaughterhouse Five and there were a lot of Breakfast of Champions references, too. I also noticed references to Timequake, Cats Cradle, and Bluebeard.

3. Nerd alert: I did have a few problems with some Kurt Vonnegut references. First, the older author is described as Kilgore Trout's only son with no mention of the late Leon Trotsky Trout. Also, at one point they don't drive somewhere because they become unstuck in time. But in Slaughterhouse Five, when he was unstuck in time, it wasn't like he didn't do anything between those moments. When they became unstuck, they should of just found themselves driving. Those are just two nitpicks and I thoroughly enjoyed all the Kurt Vonnegut references.

Anyway, I liked the book and thought it was fun read. I plan to read more books by Seth Harwood. If this book sounds good to you, I would buy it at the kindle store right away (the link doesn't work, but you can search for it) because it might just disappear one day.

[Lauren]

Just as I came to understand the joy of expressing gratitude when I was forced to write Thank You notes as a kid, so do I salute As Much Protein As an Egg and Amazon for giving this old reader a good romp in today’s world where picaresque adventures – sliding from one decade, one landscape, one character’s mind to another’s, from trivia to tragedy – happen. Wondering where to put and how to frame this bold young book, I felt startling joy to discover Harwood and his (presumably) delicious one-year-old paying old fashioned homage to the future of books on paper – like those we’ve always loved. Yes, both! Moved by a younger writer’s lusty reverence for an earlier one, I will head back to read the Vonnegut gems I missed. A triumph, Harwood, for keeping this reader engaged in a contemporary experience with the written word. I want to keep hearing your voice!

[John]

This was my first read for this author. And I check other titles from him in the future.

In this book, he borrows the character of Billy Pilgrim from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and time travels him through the events of 9/11 at the World Trade Center. He then relates this to the iconic image of the "Falling Man". These are two tricky things to bring together in writing. He really did a good job of "threading the needle" with the narrative. One false step may outraged people on this one.

Also the book mentioned in the story "The Falling People" that one of the characters wrote in the story feels to me like I wish it was a real book.

[Matt McRoberts]

An interesting story that was a bit different from what i've expected from Seth Harwood. This isn't quite the kind of story i usually read either, but i enjoyed it.