Kurt Vonnegut passed away a couple years ago. So it goes. I generally assume that anyone over the age of eighteen has read Slaughterhouse-Five, his magnum opus about the bombing of Dresden, aliens, and time travel; this probably isn’t a very good assumption, as the only reason I read it was because it was on Modern Library’s top 100 books of the 20th century. (In other words, my school didn’t assign it, unlike Jurassic Park and Brave New World. But I digress.) Anyway, he was definitely a powerhouse of literary science fiction, if such a thing is said to exist. This was his last novel, published in 1997.

In the introduction, Mr. Vonnegut explains that he had written a novel, henceforth referred to as Timequake One, with which he was not satisfied. Instead of scrapping it, he took bits of the plot, which center around Kilgore Trout, a science-fiction writer and sometimes Mr. Vonnegut’s alter ego, and combined it with philosophy and anecdotes from his life to create a semi-autobiographical ’stew.’ The central premise is that the universe, in a fit of self-doubt, contracted — but just a bit — and made everyone re-live a ten-year period, from 1991 to 2001. Unfortunately, they couldn’t change anything in this ten-year period; at the end, however, when free will returns, they have a clambake.

This isn’t quite a novel, in the traditional sense, although there is a loose sort of story (perhaps the length of a short story) that can be gleaned from between the anecdotes and tangents. Of that story, Kilgore Trout is the main character. However, unlike Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, one cannot separate the character of Kurt Vonnegut from the author Kurt Vonnegut. Not only are all the biographical details true (the ones that aren’t part of the story), but he seems to have used something related to his natural voice for the story. Of course, how can one actually know? Despite a long career of saying exactly what he thinks, what is the character, and what is real?

The philosophical point of the book is most likely in line with Mr. Vonnegut’s general philosophical points; he was a socialist, a ‘freethinker’ (secular humanist or religious skeptic, although he thought the hippopotamus was, along with music, proof that there was something greater than humanity), and a determinist, in that he didn’t particularly believe in free will. In the book, he talks about Eugene Debs, as well as several proposed constitutional amendments and his Keysnian idea that full employment is better than full production — a set of ideas that are a bit unpopular at the moment, but he certainly makes good points about extended families and supporting our fellow human beings.

One thing that’s always impressed me is authors who are willing to waste a ton of stories on one plot; one usually finds these in stories about writers, and this one is no exception. Of course, Mr. Vonnegut was at the end of a long and illustrious career, and this novel was supposed to represent his retirement from writing fiction. Nevertheless, while most of the Kilgore Trout stories that Vonnegut details are obviously borderline absurdist, they add to make this a surprisingly rich tapestry of words. A traditional novel it certainly isn’t; funny it also isn’t, except incidentally. I’d recommend this for older readers who perhaps want to think a lot and have enjoyed other of Mr. Vonnegut’s works. I don’t think I’ll give it a number of stars since it’s a bit out of my normal fare. (I couldn’t even decide on a category!)