Think of Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut's 19th and last novel (or so he says), as a victory lap. It's a confident final trot 'round the track by one of the greats of postwar American literature. After 40 years of practice, Vonnegut's got his schtick down cold, and it's a pleasure--if a slightly tame one--to watch him go through his paces one more time.

Timequake's a mongrel; it is half novel, half memoir, the project of a decade's worth of writer's block, a book "that didn't want to be written." The premise is standard-issue Vonnegut: "...a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during past decades, for good or ill, a second time..." Simultaneously, the author's favorite tricks are on display--frequent visits with the shopworn science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a Hitchcockian appearance by the author at the book's end, and frequent authorial opining on love, war, and society.


From Library Journal
Delayed over a year, Vonnegut's latest finally arrives, with alter ego Kilgore Trout facing millennial catastrophe.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly
Its author's unaffected wanderings and mutterings do make it worth reading, but not over the course of time--or in the event of a timequake--worth reading twice.


The New York Times Book Review, Valerie Sayers
At 74, Vonnegut has had enough of the writing life, he tells us in the preface, and Timequake was obviously inspired by his sense that his life's work is winding down. But let me be just the latest to declare that this work has been a blessing. Vonnegut may not have finished the novel, but for a generation of readers, he still writes the book.


From Booklist
Someone, maybe Emerson, predicted that novels would become frankly autobiographical in the twentieth century, and, sure enough, Henry Miller wrote the classic autobiographical novel Tropic of Cancer, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer starred themselves in ostensible novels, and, vice versa, Kenneth Rexroth called his actual life story (another classic) An Autobiographical Novel. Now Vonnegut, who has barged into several previous novels, erases the line between fact and fancy to mostly gabble on like the funny old geezer he is. He tells great jokes, relays more family history than anything else, suggests several new amendments to the Constitution, tosses out a fistful of his trademark tag lines (the best one is "ting-a-ling," although it probably won't supplant Slaughterhouse Five's "so it goes" as Vonnegutians' favorite), and does his mournful, baggy-pants philosopher-clown routine one more time. Oh, there is some indisputable fiction here. Vonnegut has salvaged bits of a 1996 novel, which he aborted at the last minute, based on the premise that a bump in the space-time continuum--a "time-quake"--throws the universe 10 years backward, from 2001 to 1991, and also includes Vonnegut's most famous recurring character (outstanding in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater), perpetually unsuccessful science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout. This new book's premise is the proposition that most people hate living, with good reason; mixed with the '96 stuff, it spices an utterly Vonnegutian sweet-and-sour stew deliciously. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
Vonnegut's first ``novel'' in seven years (and 14th overall) might by an extremely generous extension of the term be labeled an unassuming metafiction. Actually, it's unequal parts commonplace book, fragmentary autobiography, dystopian romance, and bemused meditation on our planet's presumable determination to destroy itself. The premise goes as follows: In the year 2001, ``a sudden glitch in the space- time continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd been doing during the past decade . . . a second time'': i.e., 2001 reverted to 1991, and ``free will kicked in again'' only after said decade had torturously re-run itself. One yearns to know what Thomas Berger might have made of this idea. Vonnegut, essentially, settles for employing it as an excuse to rummage through his own past and that of his alter-ego, the fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Accordingly, the novel about this ``timequake'' becomes a free-form farrago in which the author tenderly salutes and mourns his living and dead siblings, wives, and children; pays tribute to favorite books and writers; retells old jokes; reminisces about his experiences in WW II, and about his experiences also as a later respected public figure (visiting Nigeria after the Biafran War; giving a speech on the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima); and woolgathers--often cloyingly--about the fate of ``humanism'' in an age dominated by technology. The book severely tests a reader's patience when it's padded with random bits of semi-relevant information and needless explanations (the plot of The Scarlet Letter; the full text of the 23rd Psalm). And yet, Vonnegut's fitful summaries of the life and writings of the Hunter Thompsonlike Kilgore Trout are often very funny (the story ``The Sisters B-36,'' set on ``the matriarchal planet Booboo,'' really ought to have been written). So, as he himself might say, it goes. ``We are here on earth to fart around'' runs one of Vonnegut's more endearing pronouncements. Nobody does it better. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
There's been a timequake. And everyone--even you--must live the decade between February 17, 1991 and February 17, 2001 over again. The trick is that we all have to do exactly the same things as we did the first time--minute by minute, hour by hour, year by year, betting on the wrong horse again, marrying the wrong person again. Why? You'll have to ask the old science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. This was all his idea.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG again. It will shrink back to February 17th, 1991, but will then decide that expansion is the way to go, after all. As time marches on once more to 2001, though, Vonnegut and Trout and everybody else and everything else will have to do exactly what they did the first time through the decade, for good or ill: marry the wrong person, bet on the wrong horse. Whatever! Ten years of deja vu all over again! At least deja vu doesn't cause physical injury and property damage.

FROM THE CRITICS

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Vonnegut is at his best.

Chicago Sun-Times

Irresistible reading.

Newsweek

His funniest book since Breakfast of Champions

New York Times Book Review

Wry and trenchant. . .highly entertaining.

Valerie Sayers