Timequake

Joseph Heller's final two novels were Closing Time and Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. The former was a slightly messy mixture of autobiographical nostalgia, whimsical fiction, and the attitudes and philosophies of an old man. The latter was a half-assed collection of story ideas Heller had never been able to make into actual stories. Its protagonist was a clear stand-in for the late Heller himself, an old man with writer's block just trying to whip together one more decent story before dying. I mention Heller's final two efforts not just because Heller and Vonnegut go hand-in-hand when it comes to twentieth century literature, but also because Vonnegut's final novel, Timequake, reads almost exactly like a blend of those two books. Though, this also just serves as evidence that the two authors are cut from the same cloth. It's cyclical, I guess.

Timequake is a lot of things, but it is ostensibly and superficially a story about an inexplicable event that sends everyone on Earth back in time by ten years, only to live out that same ten year period a second time exactly as before. This is really an interesting concept. Imagine reliving the last ten years of your life with perfect knowledge of every misstep you'd make and every bad thing that would befall you or your loved ones. Maybe you'd have to re-endure a great amount of physical pain or some terrible social embarrassment. But you'd probably also get to spend time again with an old friend or a recently deceased family member. Ultimately, you'd be reliving an awful lot of mundane stuff. Reading the same books you've already read, seeing movies for the first time in spite of already having seen them, putting in countless hours at school or at work. The timequake doesn't offer anyone any second chances. It only allows and forces people to repeat the last ten years of their lives. What would you take away form an experience like this? Would you be numb, the second time around, to tragedies and celebrations? Or would certain conversations and events carry added emotional weight if you knew something terrible and unexpected were going to happen to someone? Would you cringe at some of your own previous misdeeds, and take personal pride in accomplishments or small favors you;d done for others that you'd long forgotten about? Would you view the ten-year rerun as a gift, a ten-year extension on your life, and an opportunity to revisit the past? Or would the experience leave you much more apathetic to the entire human experience? Furthermore, once you regained free will when the ten years had run their course for a second time, how would you react to life suddenly being a series of unknown events happening to you in "real time" once more?

Vonnegut never really gets around to answering any of these questions or even really attempting to explore them. That's too bad, and it definitely feels like Timequake missed some major opportunities to be Vonnegut's deepest and most philosophically complex book yet. But then again, that was never Vonnegut's style. It was probably very challenging for him, or anyone else, to cram so much humanity into a brief and humorous book. So instead, Vonnegut spends most of Timequake talking about some of his life experiences and his relationships with different family members and colleagues and mentors. He also spends a lot of ink talking about "Kilgore Trout," a fictional writer who has appeared in many of Vonnegut's works who here more than ever serves blatantly as Vonnegut's own alter-ego. The "plot" gets very sticky very often. The book is narrated by its author, but this same narrator is another character who endures the timequake, so we're left with "Author Kurt" writing openly and honestly about this own real life stories but also writing about going through the timequake. And then we've also got Kilgore Trout, sort of a "Fictional Kurt," going through the same process and then interacting with "Narrator Kurt" at the book's conclusion. But the plot hardly mattered, even more so here than in most Vonnegut novels, and the real meat of the story - or non-story, really - was found in all the brief several-sentence sections which composed the book. The whole thing very much felt like an old man's final nuggets of wisdom and parting words. It was the only novel Vonnegut wrote between 1990 and his death in 2007, although the guy was very active and engaging in all kinds of interviews and essays during his final years, hardly a Salinger-like recluse.

I'll obviously have to read the last four Vonnegut books in my backlog before I can pretend to understand his entire literary trajectory, but this book felt like a suitable end to his career as a novelist. Like everything he's written except for Player Piano, it was light and easy to read, shining all sorts of light on the follies of humankind with a very slightly sorrowful apathy. But it also felt much less cynical and depressing than his darkest material, and it left me wondering if the writer had found something to be hopeful about or thankful for in his old age. I'd love to read through those four Vonnegut books with haste, but that's never been my approach toward these first ten, and I think I'd do myself a disservice by packing six books by the same author into a month's time. I'll finish off the Vonnegut portion of my backlog soon enough, I'm sure, but for now? It's time to look elsewhere.