Timequake.

by Kurt Vonnegut (New York: G. P. Putnam's Son's, 1997); 219 pp.; $23.95 cloth.

First, a disclosure. Kurt Vonnegut, the honorary president of the American Humanist Association, and I, the AHA president, both hail from Indianapolis, Indiana ("Naptown" to many of its denizens, "End-o-noplace" to some of its detractors), and attended rival high schools on the same street. As a kid, I played tuba in the Newsboys Band, led by a very old guy named Vandewarker, who had played with John Philip Sousa. The band met in the loft of the old Vonnegut Hardware Company, long since sacrificed to urban renewal. My wife and I were married in the Unitarian chapel designed by Vonnegut's father, and the previous minister had been a signer of Humanist Manifesto I and the second president of the AHA. Having disclosed this connection, however tenuous, I suppose it is okay for one Hoosier writer to review the work of another.

Vonnegut, once described by Graham Greene as "one of the best living American writers," is something of a publishing phenomenon. All of his books, beginning with Player Piano (1952), are still in print. There are even Cliffs Notes on his major works and a 693-page volume called The Vonnegut Encyclopedia. But now, with a forty-six-year legacy, Vonnegut says (in jest, I hope) that Timequake will be his last book. "This is just sort of a coda on my career," he says in the September 30, 1997, New York Times.

Timequake is not so much a novel as, like so much of his work, a vast and vastly entertaining, marvelously inventive bouillabaisse of jokes, insights, exhortations, memoirs, eye-openers, autobiographical fragments, roastings, whoopee cushions, puncturings of posturings, and wisdom. Like his previous eighteen books, it is a fun romp and a damn good read.

The basic plot of Timequake is rather simple, although getting from the prologue to page 219 involves enough detours, switchbacks, rest stops, and bumpy alleys to drive a AAA technician around the bend. (Sorry, but after reading Vonnegut one cannot help but concoct goofy metaphors.) A "timequake, a sudden glitch in the space continuum," zaps everybody and everything in an instant from February 13, 2001, back to February 17, 1991. So everyone has to do and say everything they did or said during the previous decade. "Then we all had to get 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. You name it!"

And what a wild ride it is. Vonnegut is one of his own characters and interacts with a fictional character from several of his earlier works, hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Vonnegut moves back and forth from humor to seriousness. For example, this is what he has to say about money:

So we have in this summer of 1996

... faithless custodians of Capital

making themselves multimillionaires

and multibillionaires, while

playing beanbag with money better

spent on creating meaningful

jobs and training people to fill

them, and raising our young and

retiring our aid in surroundings of

respect and safety... Why throw

money at problems? That is what

money is for. Should the nation's

wealth be redistributed? It has

been and continues to be redistributed

to a few people in a manner

strikingly unhelpful.

And on humanism:

We would prefer to live our lives

as Humanists and not talk about

it, or think more about it than we

think about breathing. Humanists

try to behave decently and honorably

without any expectation of

rewards or punishments in an

afterlife.... We serve as well as

we can the highest abstraction of

which we have some understand

Timequake was difficult to write. Vonnegut says he rewrote it significantly just before it was nearly finished. Now he wants to spend time on his new love, silk screens, and answering his mail. Come on, Kurt, a lot of people will be unhappy if you do decide to hang up your Smith-Corona.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association.