Review by Charles Flowers
Something like 60 percent of Americans, we're told, have not executed their last will and testament. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut is no longer among their number.
This is a book that finally honors the most important people in Vonnegut's life, celebrates his achievements as writer and father and husband, condemns a society that honors the screen above the printed word and the Internet above creativity, and dismisses human life itself as a con at best, a horrible swamp of cruelty and self-destruction at worst. All along, he continually reminds us he is of sound mind.
As his legions of admirers will expect, Vonnegut writes here with a kind of Midwest-derived humor that charms many but can be read as smug. His famous alter ego Kilgore Trout, a science-fiction writer given to pungent sayings, appears throughout "Timequake" to advance the plot and accentuate the author's own sardonic noodling.
The "timequake" Vonnegut invents is a global event. On February 13, 2001, everyone and everything, to use his phrase, is sent smartly back to February 17, 1991. We are all forced to live through that decade of our lives again without being able to change a thing, though we can remember every horror or buffoonery that is going to occur. We have no free will. Consciously so, this time around.
In "Timequake" Vonnegut puckishly plays around with the possible consequences of this condition and its sudden end. Like his drearier thoughts about the preposterous ironies of history and humankind's desire to destroy the planet, this intellectual frolicking is his goal, not the creation of fully rounded characters in a conventional novel. As he says of Trout (and himself), "he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature . . . was generic among writers of science fiction."
In this aside and in many others, "Timequake" fulfills Vonnegut's testamentary aims at age 74. His tongue does not seem to be anywhere near his cheek when he talks again and again of past years of "writer's block." Here he is the composer pulling out the major themes of decades of work and weaving them into a sprawling, comprehensive farewell.
It is difficult to guess whether readers unfamiliar with Vonnegut will fully appreciate the references that are effective because they echo his earlier novels so vividly or the autobiographical bits that suggest how his unmistakable voice was formed. Those who know the work, however, are certain to hear a note as deep and abiding as Prospero's last soliloquy, while being entertained yet again by Vonnegut's wit, moved by his melancholy skepticism, and surprised by his delightful anecdotes about a life that seems very well lived.
Charles Flowers' next book, "Science Odyssey," is scheduled to be published by William Morrow in January 1998.
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