If Timequake is a novel, then it’s the 14th and last novel by Kurt Vonnegut. But in the book’s prologue Vonnegut tells us he tried to write a novel called Timequake and failed, so the book is instead a “stew” of memoir and essay and pieces of drafts and plans for Timequake all jumbled together. Is that a novel? Or is Vonnegut sneakier than he lets on, and the whole thing isn’t as jumbled as it looks but a meta-novel, a reflection on novels and novel writing?
Timequake was published in 1997, just before Vonnegut’s 75th birthday. Whatever else he was doing with the book, there’s a temptation to see it as a career summation. Vonnegut writes in a slightly elegiac register, still ironic and wry but with the perspective of a man late in life looking around him and realizing how far he’s come and how the world’s changed over time. You have a sense Vonnegut knew this would be his last novel-length work. (He’d produce a short story and two books of essays before his death in 2007.)
Throughout the book Vonnegut works in a description of a party, specifically a clambake, in celebration of his recurring character, woebegone science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. At least some of the valedictory tone of the book comes from the autumnal yet serene mood of that event, which includes Vonnegut himself as one of the invitees. It takes place in late-2001, and while Vonnegut also has moments set in 2010, the clambake’s chronologically one of the last events of the book and concludes the main part of Timequake. The dominant sense is that we’re seeing things wrapping up with a great celebration.
Trout’s celebrated for his heroic actions a few months earlier. The universe had reversed its expansion in 2001 for 10 years and then snapped back, meaning that everyone on Earth relived the 10-year span from 1991 to 2001 aware they were repeating their actions but unable to change anything. When this timequake ended, most were unable to handle the sudden liberation. Enter Trout, who inspired people with a pithy sentence: “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do.”
The book’s therefore the story of Trout’s finest hour and ultimate triumph, as well as a gallimaufry of recollections, reflections, and the occasional synopsis of a plot thread from Vonnegut’s first attempt at a novel called Timequake. There’s a dirty joke whose punch-line becomes a recurring phrase. There are summaries of Kilgore Trout stories.
And there are familiar themes that Vonnegut’s wrestled with for decades. The limits of language. Time and predestination; imprisonment and memory. Predestination here is imprisonment, two of Vonnegut’s recurring fascinations united, as the timequake imprisons people in 10 years of their own past.
The idea of the timequake is something Vonnegut investigates and plays with in many ways, though. He compares people caught in repeating time to actors on a stage, for example, and tells us one of the discarded subplots from his first attempt at the book was a thread about noted thespian John Wilkes Booth and his fictional illegitimate descendants.
But instead of a straightforward novel about the timequake we get a narrative interrupted by reflections and memories. There are timequakes in the memoir parts of Timequake, moments like Proust’s madeleines that pull Vonnegut back to his past; hearing a monologue from a play, or (at the very end) finding a letter he wrote decades earlier. On one hand, the past is inescapable, a prison we relive. On the other, there’s unity to a life, and some moments will always have living meaning.
How ironically should we take the book? How much should we believe that Vonnegut failed to write the novel the first time, and just threw a bunch of ingredients into a manuscript as a result? Timequake as it exists is like a unity, stretching from past to future, bound together by Vonnegut, by his family, by his concern with fiction and the human condition.
It opens with Vonnegut pondering how awful life is. By the end his thoughts are, if not more upbeat, at least mellower. There’s a value to endings, he tells us, and joy to be had in the occasional goodness of other people. And joy to be had in the best moments of life. Perhaps Timequake couldn’t be written in any other way and get that message across so convincingly.
By making himself a character Vonnegut makes the Kurt Vonnegut of memoir, the Vonnegut of 1997 when the book’s published, blend into a fictional Vonnegut of 2001 who lived through the timequake. Early in the book he calls Kilgore Trout his alter ego, and then later writes Trout’s death as though writing the death of his own writing career. Again, it’s difficult not to feel this is a conscious farewell.
That’s exacerbated by odd coincidence. Vonnegut was naturally a prescient writer; he observed so well, and had such a strong a sense of his own place and perspective, that without intending it he wrote works which accurately defined the future we’re living in almost 20 years after his death. Something else happens with Timequake, where free will returns in February of 2001 and Trout’s celebrated six months later. Which means that final farewell to the repetitive world of the 1990s and the 20th century that Vonnegut wrote about, the moment he imagines as an opening-up to the scary unpredictable world of the 21st century, was held in late-August of 2001.
Events in September would drive North America into a new century, but not one so different from the last that the art and writing of that time has stopped resonating. Vonnegut’s works, Timequake not least, are grounded in the moments of their making but contain enough wisdom that they speak to moments beyond.