More endearing hocus pocus

In a line-up of any literary originals, American writer Kurt Vonnegut, now 75, would have to stand apart - if not exactly as an odd man out, at least as the resident eccentric. Weird for sure, he is also very smart. More than smart; Vonnegut is brave, clever, honest and wise beyond the gags as certainly confirmed by satirical, minor masterworks such as Mother Night (1961) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Readers who wade through the gags, the zany wisecracks and one-liners cannot help noticing the weight of truth which steers his offbeat, at times self-indulgent fiction. Vonnegut's Vaudevillean comic vision has always been deeply despairing, determinedly anti-war and very, very funny. So funny it is easy to miss out on the seriousness of his satirical intent as evident in Galapagos (1985).

Having made that point, it must be acknowledged that, as Vonnegut the unlikely soothsayer, campus guru and literary outsider declared a long time ago, any novel has said all it has to say long before it reaches half-way. According to him, the closing half of fictional work requires advising the reader: "Here's your hat. Here's your coat. Hope you had a good time. Bye bye now."

The same could be said of Vonnegut's career which is contained in Slaughterhouse-Five, just as his life has been dominated by a defining experience, the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, a massacre he witnessed and Slaughterhouse describes.

Long before Hocus Pocus (1990), his 13th novel and yet another haphazard, conversational stroll through fact, fiction and autobiography, it was clear that Vonnegut had completely lost interest in even the most token of gestures towards conventional narrative. As he admitted in 1983, "the only way I can regain credit for my early work is - to die." And so it goes; he is trapped in a fantastical world of his own subversive invention and humour.

Only Vonnegut would recall as he does in his latest offering Timequakes (Cape, £15.99 in UK) Heinrich Boll remarking to him that obedience was the basic flaw in the German character, one brief paragraph after announcing "I wish I'd invented Rollerblades." It's always the same; the profound and the wacky.

By any standards, even Vonnegut's, this performance should leave readers guessing and though published as a novel, it is wryly reminiscent of his last book, Fates Worse Than Death (1991), a memoir of sorts. It is difficult to read the prologue of Timequake as anything other than a possible apology, and probable farewell to the business of writing books. If ever a work came close not to be written, this is it. In fact, one might argue, perhaps he didn't write it at all, he merely thought it at intervals. He even admits to having salvaged it from the wreck of its earlier self.

It is a collage of observations, reflections, asides, memories, moments of panic and prophecies as well as frequently acknowledging Vonnegut's dead, particularly his family, his suicide mother, his father, uncle Alex Vonnegut "a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman" and his brother and sister. While his sister Allie died of "cancer of the everything" long before her time, Vonnegut's big brother Bernie died a few months ago, during the slow gestation of this book. His passing leaves Kurt the kid brother alone. "I was the baby of the family. Now I don't have anybody to show off for anymore."

Characteristically relaxed, Timequake clings to a central idea concerning a global timequake due to occur in New York City in February, 2001. This event is attributed to science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. Before you start to panic, be reminded of the fact that Trout is a Vonnegut creation. "Trout doesn't really exist" he announces helpfully, "he has been my alter ego in several of my other novels" and adds "I have salvaged a few of the thousands of stories he wrote between 1931, when he was fourteen, and 2001, when he died at the age of 84." Much of the narrative continues in this topsy-turvy way. But there are many serious interludes and honest descriptions of a writer realising he has nothing new to write yet plenty to say. Referring to Hemingway's Old Man and The Sea, Vonnegut says of that book: "It could be that the sharks Hemingway had in mind were critics who hadn't much liked his first novel in ten years, Across The River And Into The Trees, published two years earlier. As far as I know, he never said so. But the marlin could have been that novel." During the winter of 1996, Vonnegut found himself "the creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point, which had never wanted to be written in the first place."

Vonnegut's narrative meanders along; an anecdote here, a barbed point there. "Now imagine this: A man creates a hydrogen bomb for a paranoid Soviet Union, makes sure it will work, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize! This real-life character, worthy of a story by Kilgore Trout, was the late physicist Andrei Sakharov. He won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his."

Wary of appearing too campaigning, he throws in a funny story about gangster John Dillinger writing a fan letter to Henry Ford, thanking him "for making such fast and agile getaway cars."

"This is not a Gothic novel," he remarks late, if superfluously, in the narrative, before wandering onto the definition of such works made by yet another now dead friend, a Southern writer who tended to write them under a feminine nom de plume. Earlier, Vonnegut describes good old Kilgore "sitting on his cot in a shelter for homeless men that was once the Museum of the American Indian."

There is no denying that Timequake is yet another stroll through a singular, rag-bag imagination of a hard-hitting satirist determined never to forgive mankind for its many sins against man. But nor has Vonnegut ever lost either his humour or his humanity.