There we were, Scattered around the Arts Quad, the proud men and women of Simon Straight College, Class of '71: a thousand gowns casually smoking joints and playing Frisbee with their mortarboards as the parents shook hands under the trees.
There you are, dropped right into the middle of the setting of this novel. The opening lines of the novel introduce, to an extent, the zeitgeist within which events will play out. The narrator clues you in that this is going be one of those stories about a group of young people coming of age at a significant moment in the life of many Americans. The opening paragraph even identifies for the reader with greater specificity the time period in which this moment of transition occurs. This sentence is the literary equivalent of starter’s pistol going off: reader is familiar with what they are watching and recognizes the sound of the gunshot for what it is.
"Yeah, good evening. I think you should know that there's a bomb, a pipe bomb in one of your rooms, I'm not saying which one. It's set to go off in forty-three minutes…"
Except that the opening line of the novel is a ploy to throw the reader off track. The story does not proceed from that opening shot into predictable sort of event one expects. There’s a joker in the deck and he’s the narrator. He is the first in his family to graduate college and ordinarily this would be an achievement precedes a positive progression upward in the family lineage. But Peter is not just a joker in the deck figuratively. From the point of being in that cap and gown, his story is one of being trapped in a funnel of disappointment with no way out except being squeezed through the bottom. His little laugh in making fake bomb threats eventually comes to be seen as a high point in his post-graduate existence.
I felt myself drift out in space like an astronaut with a snapped lifeline, slowly spinning, getting smaller and smaller.
“Astronaut with a Snapped Lifeline” would not be an entirely inappropriate title for this novel. In retrospect, in fact, it might actually have been a much more preferable title as the metaphorical imagery is not just thematically fitting, but way more memorable than The Breaks. Of course, it also carries the potential for being mistaken for a science fiction story, but them’s the breaks. The point is that when Keller writes this line about himself, it is within a very specific context, but taken out of that context and dropped literally into almost any page of the novel, it would not be out of place. This bit of narrative self-reflection and confession about himself very easily could stand as the overriding issue facing Peter Keller and the thematic engine which drives his entire essentially plotless tale.
