Even His Mind’s Pocket Lint Is Welcome

The word is already out on Kurt Vonnegut’s latest, and maybe last, novel.

“Timequake,” we hear, is an assemblage of used parts that Vonnegut cannibalized from a failed fiction project, also titled “Timequake,” that broke up on the reefs of writer’s block. At 75, we hear, the author of “The Sirens of Titan,” “Mother Night,” “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Deadeye Dick,” once one of America’s freshest and most original talents, has run out of things to say.

This poses two related problems for the reader. If Vonnegut is indeed recycling the same old stuff, why bother to read it again? And if the word that’s already out is indeed correct, why bother to read 219 pages of Vonnegut’s words just to arrive at the same conclusion? Either way, it would be deja vu all over again.

It would be, in fact, like living through a timequake, which is what happens to Vonnegut’s characters here. On Feb. 13, 2001, the universe hiccups. Instead of continuing to expand, it begins to shrink back to the pinpoint from which it issued in the Big Bang. Time reverses itself--all the way to Feb. 17, 1991, after which the universe changes its mind and resumes expanding.

This means that everyone on Earth has to live through the ‘90s a second time, aware of being in “the rerun” but unable to change a thing.

Why are they aware? we might ask. In a true rerun, they wouldn’t know they were in a rerun. And why should time zip backward instantaneously, then lumber forward at the same old speed? Vonnegut’s lack of attention to these details--lack of interest, it would seem--shows that the word that’s already out has some truth in it: The plot of “Timequake” is a gutted shell.

For when Vonnegut is interested, the details are as inventive as ever. Ten years of being moved around on automatic pilot, he says, have left people standing off-balance and paying little attention to where their cars and planes are going. When “free will kicks in again,” nearly everyone on Earth falls or crashes.

One exception: 84-year-old Kilgore Trout, out-of-print science fiction writer and skid row bum, the alter ego Vonnegut “freed,” along with other characters, in “Breakfast of Champions.” For Trout, all illusions long since beaten out of him, being in a timequake and not being in one are pretty much the same thing.

Into the gutted area where the rest of the plot used to be, Vonnegut dumps family history--his real family and Trout’s imaginary one--and other lint from the pockets of his mind: reflections on the state of the arts, the state of the world, growing old, being “nuts,” intermittently enjoying a life that the horrors of World War II long ago convinced him wasn’t worth living at all.

Sometimes he does say new things, or at least old things newly packaged. Responding to a complaint that he creates caricatures rather than characters in his fiction--a criticism also leveled at Vonnegut--Trout says:

“As though the planet weren’t already dying because it has 3 billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters! . . . If I wasted my time creating characters, I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in.”

And even when Vonnegut is unquestionably recycling the same old stuff, reading him still has its pleasures. We don’t mind so much when a good friend repeats himself because it reminds us of the continuity of the friendship. That’s what the word that’s already out fails to acknowledge--our affection for Vonnegut’s voice.

In an America in which the dominant voice is hype, and in which even negativity is usually expressed as aggressive bombast, Vonnegut’s gentle pessimism--the “gaily mournful” quality that he ascribes to Trout’s writing--has always had the ring of truth.

“I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives,” he notes. “That’s how come I write so good.”