This piece appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on the 26 September 1997

Let us be perfectly frank for a change", says the narrator of this novel. "For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough." This tempts us to reply, in Kurt Vonnegut's own unmistakable frazzled whine (Woody Allen in a limousine on Second Avenue with Isaac Bashevis Singer): "For a change? For a change?" And indeed, here is the Old Master, bitching and moaning and entertaining, perhaps for the last time (he insists that it is the last time), in his same old imitable way; short paragraphs, rhetorical questions, hysterical exclamation marks, sentences which point in several directions at once, and all. Of course, it's more complex than that. What else could it be, in a world where "horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks" enable books like this to be written?

The precursor, or first draft, of Timequake was a novel called Timequake One. In Timequake One - and, we are to presume, in Timequake too - at precisely 2.27pm New York time on February 13, 2001, the universe suffers (or has suffered, or will suffer; the author is obviously unable to be any more grammatically clear on that than the reader) a crisis in self-confidence. "Should it go on expanding indefinitely? What was the point?" Instead, it shrinks by ten years, casting its inhabitants back to February 17, 1991, from which point everyone is forced to live the same lives all over again. Since this is no more than a rerun of the cosmic videotape, free will, and any illusion thereof, are suspended. Everyone has to earn their way back to 2001 "the hard way, minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again, getting the clap again".

The moment that seems to excite Vonnegut - the only moment in which the book comes anywhere near being a lively piece of fiction - is the moment when the universe begins to expand again. Normal time is resumed. After ten years on automatic pilot, everyone has stopped caring. With all their decisions made for them, they have been paying as much attention to what goes on as commuters driving to the office. Suddenly, the responsibility to steer is returned to them. The ensuing mayhem prompts a classic and reductive Vonnegutian rant on the nature of humour, at the core of which, he insists, lies the spectacle of "people deprived of dignified postures by gravity instead of sex"- life, in short, is the pratfall Vonnegut has always known it to be. New York's pratfall is spectacular. Vehicles collide, or drive headlong into rivers; buildings explode. All over the city, caught between one step and the next, people are falling down. But, at this, something even more spectacular occurs; Kilgore Trout, familiar to us all as Vonnegut's alter ego and, by 2001, a hopeless bum who doesn't care whether he has lost his free will or not, becomes the unlikely hero of the hour. He rushes into the American Academy of Arts and Letters shouting, "Wake up! For God's sake, wake up, wake up! Free will! Free will!" Unable to drive them from their apathy, even by this shameless plagiarism from Paul Revere, he constructs the mantric exhortation, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do." From the Academy this simple heartening message spreads across a waking world.

The problem here is one of relish, of appetite. Timequake One, Vonnegut explains, is a novel he failed to write because he was tired, or old, or had lost faith in the novel, or all three. So, apparently, is Timequake. We never really see the event, or its consequences. The timequake is not animated for us. A few bald sentences of description serve both to establish it and transform it firmly into a device, an anecdote of an anecdote, an object for discussion, less a metaphor than a notion. From then on, we are not, however much reference the author makes to story-telling, at the mercy of the story; we are at the mercy of the author. Anything we learn comes mediated by the more or less amiable ramblings of Vonnegut himself; and there is much to learn. Did we know that Kurt Vonnegut's maternal grandfather, Albert Lieber, was a brewer, whose coffee-flavoured beer won a Gold Medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889? Or that Uncle Alex Vonnegut's wife, Aunt Raye, "arranged his library according to the size and colour of the volumes"? Did we know that Vonnegut's maternal great-uncle Barus was a founder and president of the American Physical Society? On the surface of this dish (mush or nourishing soup, depending on our levels of goodwill on the day we describe it) of biographical anecdote, humanist rhetoric and methodological description, float a few scraps of fiction which tend to slip away from the spoon before we can enjoy them.

"All I do with short story ideas now", Vonnegut admits early on in Timequake, "is rough them out, credit them to Kilgore Trout, and put them in a novel." He seems to do the same with novels, too. The effect here is less of a novel of ideas than an idea for a novel, one which should come, not with a blurb that describes it as "wickedly funny, but wise", but with the warning: "This rough schematic for a Kurt Vonnegut novel has been put together by the master for his apprentices and fans, who have spent many years buying into the literary and intellectual toolkit which allows them to work it up into something they can read."

If the plot of Timequake has been reduced to a notion, or, more likely, never expanded from one, its characters have been thinned to Kilgore Trout and the staff of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, who amount in some instances to a cruel running joke, and in some instances to less. Monica Pepper, for instance, "fictitious Executive Secretary of the Academy, is notable for having swan-dived into a swimming pool in Aspen, Colorado two years before; landed on her husband Zoltan; and paralysed him from the waist down." Mrs Pepper, says the author, "bore a striking resemblance to my late sister Allie". Timequake is populated by Vonnegut's family and friends - the ghosts of his past who, after the watershed of Slaughterhouse Five, increasingly elbowed out the more fictional characters - and, of course, by himself.

So what, actually, is Timequake about? Well, it is about writer's block and the operation of memory. It is about having witnessed the firebombing of Dresden. It is about having a sister called Allie. It is about having free will and not being free to use it. It is about how Kilgore Trout's prescription, "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do", might usefully have been addressed to the author himself two-and-a-half decades ago. It is about being Kurt Vonnegut, seventy-five years old. One of the perks we allow an ageing master is to perform all the negligent technical acrobatics he still can. We like him to entertain us without trying (or at least appear to), to reveal himself as curmudgeonly, opinionated and a bit out of date and out of sympathy; we like him to write his own epitaph. It might be objected that Vonnegut has done this before. Another perk we allow is leeway; an Old Master, like an old barge, needs room in which to turn.

I imagine Timequake appealing deeply to his immense and yet immensely local readership, the extended family of Vonnegut-literacy, who continue to validate his dense and increasingly loopy anti-fiction of himself and his times. Some of the book is funny, some of it touching, and a very little of it both. For the most part, it is as irritating as it is clever; and in the end, despite his efforts, it appeals, like even his best work, less to the human being in us than the adolescent. The self-portraiture, which seems merciless, is in fact irredeemably sentimental and defensive; the humanity of which he seems impelled to convince us is clearly a response to criticism. Kurt Vonnegut used to build model aeroplanes and jerk off in his room - we guessed that. Kurt Vonnegut witnessed one of the most barbaric events of his century, and after he had managed to write directly about it, he had nothing left to say - we feel everything he wants us to feel about that, perhaps more. Kurt Vonnegut is old, and bored with the novel - do we have to be too?

Copyright Times Literary Supplement 1997