Onyx reviews: Mr. Breakfast by Jonathan Carroll

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 7/23/2022

Mr. Breakfast is a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of getting a tattoo.

Not really, but the tattoo Graham Patterson gets while on a cross-country trip that comes about when he decides to abandon his failed life does more than decorate his arm. It reveals to him two radically different trajectories his life could have taken if he'd made different choices. It's a Dickensian situation where he plays the part of the ghosts of the past, present and future in his own life.

Graham's lifelong aspiration has been to build a successful career as a stand-up comic. While he's had momentary successes (a sympathetic character tells him that part of one of his routines was funny), he comes to accept that he'll never make it into the big leagues. Abandoning that dream is a hard pill to swallow, coming on the heels, as it does, of breaking up with the love of his life. He is resigned to the fact that he will probably end up in California working at a job his brother has arranged for him.

An impromptu stop in North Carolina puts him outside a tattoo parlor where he is fascinated by the quality of the illustrations in the window. Without any intention of getting a tattoo, he goes inside to look around. Before long, he has convinced himself to get inked. He selects an intriguing design from a book the artist shows him. Because it will take more than one session, he agrees to stay in town at the artist's mother's B&B, where he takes the first of many photographs that will bring about his future success and fame. Seemingly trivial decisions like these can completely alter a person's fate.

Graham is another in a long line of Carroll's characters who discover (by accident or, sometimes, by design) that there's much more to the world than anyone has ever suspected. The tattoo artist is an agent of the broader universe, and the particular pattern Graham chooses has mystical properties. He becomes Graham 1. He has the ability to view (but not live in) the alternate realities of Graham 2 and Graham 3. He can dip back and forth among these three lives a limited number of times and stay as long as he likes in any of them. Then he must choose which one he wants to enter permanently. Or, he can decide to not take part in the experiment at all without ever knowing how different his life might have been.

A character asks a philosophical question: if you absolutely love ice cream and are given the one-time opportunity to eat the world's most delicious ice cream, knowing that any ice cream you eat thereafter can't measure up, would you do so, or would you continue to eat regular ice cream, always knowing there's something better out there? The analogy is: if you could go back in time and choose differently, knowing something of that outcome, would you take the risk? Whatever choice Graham makes, there's no guarantee of long-term happiness. Anything could happen in any of the timelines. And what might be the impact of a decision to change things on other people whose lives he comes into contact with?

Graham isn't the only person offered the same quasi-Faustian bargain. One of the other exemplars is a well-known man who suddenly became incredibly wealthy. So, it's hard to not be tempted, although he encounters people who resisted. However, there is a downside—the longer he goes without deciding which timeline to pick the more chaotic Graham 1's life becomes. He becomes untethered in reality, slipping into pasts to rekindle relationships with childhood friends, some of whom are still children and others who are the same age he is now.

Reading a Carroll novel can be a little like experiencing a hallucination or a fever dream. Solid reality is undermined. Characters become the playthings of entities with prodigious powers. Mr. Breakfast, though, at it's heart, is about a life examined and, perhaps, found lacking. But would any previous decision have made things better? That's one of the great unknowables about life.