[In the following review, Disch argues that Timequake discloses much information about Vonnegut himself.]

Timequake is a novel by, and starring, Kurt Vonnegut. His co-star, and virtually the only other "character" in the book, is his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, who figured in two earlier Vonnegut novels, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and Breakfast of Champions (1973). Trout has also published his own novel, Venus on the Half Shell (1975), but since it was written, without Vonnegut's consent, by Philip Jose Farmer, that book cannot legally be accounted part of the Trout oeuvre, though it enjoys its own peculiar and illegitimate glory as one of the few novels published by a non-entity.

It may be that the concept for Timequake is a steal from Thorton Wilder's Our Town. (Vonnegut discreetly acknowledges as much.) In a nutshell, everyone on Earth has to relive the 1990s on automatic pilot, observing but not participating in their lives. But what Wilder made poignant, Vonnegut simply doesn't engage with, for he refuses to deal either with the helplessness and/or horror of such an experience or with the trauma of release. No matter—intensity was never Vonnegut's forte. And anyhow Wilder had already done it.

What Vonnegut does, which no one can do better, is give a big postmodern shrug. The experience is shifted to the expert shoulders of Trout, who once again plays Mortimer Snerd to Vonnegut's own Charlie McCarthy. Like Philip Roth's Zuckerman, Trout represents his creator's self-love and self-loathing at a level of imaginative intensity that mere memoir would not allow.

And that is not to reckon with the man's own immense self-regard. Vonnegut namedrops like a rainstorm: A.E. Hotchner, Heinrich Boll, Dick Francis, Gunther Grass, Andrei Sakharov, and a host of showbiz stars that his own celebrity has brought within a handshake's distance. The extended Vonnegut family is all on hand, as at a wedding, each with a characterizing anecdote. The author's bibliography and the salient facts of his public career are offered as candidly as on a resume.

And then there are the sententiae: There shall be no more war, we must love one another, etc. He echoes Henry Fonda, echoing John Steinbeck, echoing Eugene Debs, that as long as there is anyone poor or downtrodden or in prison, he, Kurt Vonnegut, is poor, downtrodden, and imprisoned, too. Oh dear, as Vonnegut might say.

Of his writerly life we learn that he still works, virtuously, on a manual typewriter, corrects his copy with pen or pencil and then mails these pages off to his long-term professional typist in the country. This necessitates a walk first to the store, to buy a single manila envelope, and then to the post office, where he waits in line to buy a stamp. The process becomes a parading of Vonnegut's rectitude and unassuming human dignity relative to those boobs among us who use computers and fax machines or play the lottery.

If all this seems insufferably smug, it is, but since it comes from Vonnegut, America's favorite grumpy old man, you've got to love him. He has so cornered the market on elderly curmudgeonliness that his very belches (and there are plenty of them, including three or four really moldy dirty jokes) have a fragrance of temps perdu.

In a well-advised "Prologue," Vonnegut forewarns his readers that Timequake took 10 years to write, at the end of which, 74 years old, "I found myself in the winter of 1996 … the creator of a novel which did not work, which had no point, and which had never wanted to be written in the first place…. Let us think of it as Timequake. And let us think of this one, a stew made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two. Hokay?"

Hokay with me. (Though why not, in that case, put that title on the cover?) The fact is that Vonnegut's fame and bankability are such that he is now beyond rejection or even criticism. As for Trout—now a hack sci-fi writer in his eighties—though reduced to the condition and appearance of a bag lady he's still going strong, churning out unpublishable stories full of idiot-savant wisdom. His stories are, in synopsis, truly stupid, and we must be grateful that Vonnegut has had the discernment to imagine Trout's stories rather than write them.

And yet, as with Mortimer Snerd, it is Trout who may be the more memorable character. He is one of those, like Forrest Gump or Sherlock Holmes, who take their creator captive and become the boss. Even Vonnegut seems to be aware of this, for if the book has any message, it is that offered by Trout: "You were sick, but now you're well again, and there's work to do."

One may have doubts about this as a panacea to the world's problems. But as solace and wish-fulfillment, it's on a par with Voltaire's advice, as mediated through Candide, that we should tend to our own affairs, a counsel of perfection to which the reader can only answer, Hokay.