This was his final novel, and I'm calling it a novel regardless of ambiguity on the grounds of its predecessors being novels. It began life as the tale of a timequake, causing time to slip backwards a decade, then start again, obliging everyone to relive the previous ten years one moment at a time without being able to change anything. Unfortunately it just didn't want to be written so the author eventually cannibalised it and made a stew incorporating autobiographical elements. You could call it an autobiography or an extended essay, but novel works just as well. Kilgore Trout from Slaughterhouse Five features heavily, as do many, many short sketches of his stories, regarding which - in case you can't be arsed to skip back to August 2024:
Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.
It works pretty much as autobiography, even with the fiction embedded, and honestly isn't much different to Slaughterhouse Five, to which it might be deemed a sequel, I suppose.
Vonnegut's recycling of his own incomplete material is inspired, with the timequake itself serving as metaphor to the ageing process and its shifting emphasis on memory - the author being well into his seventies and duly reflective by this point. As a slightly jazzy thesis on memory and the passage of time, the book also serves to illustrate the slow disintegration of culture during the twentieth century, not so much for the sake of shaking a fist at clouds, but a lament at our having lost sight - as we most certainly have - of what makes it fun. Contrary to the publicity, this isn't a bunch of random observations indulgently slung together but a very clear and direct summary of our world interspersed with jokes and asides, specifically because jokes and asides - and even throwaway synopses for science-fiction tales which will never be written - are the details which matter most. It's sad, funny and, as always, thought provoking.
I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't much about James Blocker and his ongoing fight with the Droon from Rigel, but you can't have everything.
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