Kilgore Trout is a widely-published but unrecognized and virtually-unknown writer who is invited to deliver the keynote address at an arts festival in Midland City. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy businessman in Midland City, but he is becoming increasingly mentally unstable. The novel is achronological and frequently shifts between the points-of-view of Hoover, Trout, and various minor characters. These are people such as Wayne Hoobler—a man who wants Hoover to hire him—and Kurt Vonnegut himself, who appears as the author of the book, and who has control over its setting and characters. According to Jerome Klinkowitz, a Vonnegut scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, "The novel's structure is a simple one yet it employs simultaneously evolving plots from different times and spaces."