Weeks 9 and 10 "Timequake" (1997)

Kilgore Trout to the rescue!  Seriously!  You didn't think that Kurt Vonnegut would sign off from novel writing without giving his alter ego and greatest creation one last moment in the limelight, right?

Of course, Timequake almost didn't come to pass.  In his prologue, Vonnegut compares his struggle to bring this novel into being to the existential struggle of Santiago against his prize catch in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and explains how the unfinished manuscript that he calls Timequake One — "which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place" — was gutted and recycled to create our current text, Timequake Two.  He finished the manuscript, "a stew made from [Timequake One's] best parts mixed with thoughts and remembrances during the past seven months," one day after his seventy-fourth birthday.

Part of what makes this novel so fascinating — and a key reason why I chose this for the class instead of Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions or Bluebeard — is its unintentional and tragic, yet unavoidable, historical context, thanks to its central plot device.  Writing in 1997 about a timequake that would hurtle his characters from February 13, 2001 to February 17, 1991, Vonnegut had no idea that the September 11th attacks would happen and yet, we can't read Timequake without being indelibly haunted by that knowledge, and I think that, for anyone who reads this book from September 12, 2001 forward (as I first did in the spring of 2002), the book's resonance is greatly amplified — by our shared desire to "turn back the clock" to the simpler times before that day, and also in our sympathies for the book's characters, who, having survived the timequake will have to face yet another life-altering challenge a little over half a year later.

In a 1998 interview, Marylynn Uricchio asked whether Timequake would really be Vonnegut's final novel:

Q. Did you say Timequake was your last book so you couldn't change your mind?
A. I'm quite old. I'll be 76 in a few days. Some of this is an actuarial matter. I'm writing short stuff, I'm writing an op ed piece today about the hurricane in South America, but that's all I'm doing now. No more novels. No more books need be written.

He proved true to his word — while Vonnegut would publish several other books in his lifetime, including a slim volume of radio monologues, (God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999), a collection of his early unpublished stories (Bagombo Snuff Box, 1999) and a book of essays (A Man Without a Country, 2005) he never did publish another novel, even if he often hinted that he was at work on one entitled, If God Were Alive Today. Several posthumous books have appeared as well, namely three odds-and-sods collections of unpublished stories, essays, speeches, etc.: Armageddon in Retrospect, Look at the Birdie and While Mortals Sleep.

Later in the same interview, in response to Uricchio's asking, "When your work is talked about 100 years from now, what do you want people to say?," Vonnegut offers an elegant summation of his life's work:

I doubt it will be talked about 100 years from now. I don't know. All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. I'd be certainly pleased if 100 years from now people are still laughing.

He has another 86 years to go, but 14 years since that statement — and five since his death — I'd say that his reputation is (and will be) secure for a very long time.

Here's our reading schedule for Timequake:

• Thursday, May 24:  prologue - ch. 25
• Tuesday, May 29:  ch. 26 - epilogue

And here are a few supplemental reading links:

• "Vonnegut Stew," Valerie Sayers' New York Times review of the novel: [link]
• "Kurt Vonnegut Says He's Retiring (We'll See)," Paul D. Colford's Los Angeles Times article on Timequake and Vonnegut's career plans after its publication: [link]
• "Breakfast with Kurt Vonnegut," Uricchio's interview from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: [link]