[In the following review, Sayers describes Timequake as a mix of novel and memoir.]

Like so many of my peers, I began reading Kurt Vonnegut while the Vietnam War was raging. By the time I discovered his great World War II novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, the earth had shifted under my feet. Vonnegut, satirist and tragedian, seemed like a literary elder bearing witness. (Some elder; he was in his 40's then.) And I knew I was embarking on a lifelong relationship. Vonnegut thought the big thoughts—about war and death and how we ought to treat one another—and regarded them not only as transformative but as useful, stylish, even fun. He was not chained to any one idea about "story structure" but was the prankster of italics, exclamation points and one-sentence paragraphs.

He was a word cartoonist, a wise guy, a true subversive!

Nearly 30 years later, Vonnegut is still making the pompous look silly and the decent and lovely look decent and lovely. His new so-called novel, Timequake, is, as Vonnegut describes it, a "stew." He has taken the best pickings from a novel that wasn't working and interspersed them with a running commentary on his own life and the state of the universe. The mix is thick and rich: a political novel that's not a novel, a memoir that is not inclined to reveal the most private details of the writer's life.

The bits of the novel that Vonnegut has rescued (or chopped up and put on to simmer) are odd and confusing—but I am often thrown by the plots of fantasy and science fiction. Once Vonnegut has discarded big chunks of the original book (who knows how many?) and has summarized the plots of several others, the remaining story is murky, to say the least. But no matter. Whenever faced with a Vonnegut plot I cannot altogether follow, I always read faster. The man's mind is racing, and it is exhilarating to give chase.

The fictional settings include the real-life American Academy of Arts and Letters and a writer's colony called Xanadu. As usual, Vonnegut is both celebrating and satirizing the writing life. It is this tension between admiration and disdain that informs his view of his characters, too. The old Vonnegut alter ego, Kilgore Trout, science fiction writer, is on hand to deliver the wry and trenchant lines about art, poverty and violence. The other major characters, a blond secretary and a black security guard, telegraph Vonnegut's sharp interest in class and race more than they suggest real people. As Trout himself puts it, "If I'd wasted my time creating characters … I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter."

Much of Vonnegut's work (including the crystalline autobiographical opening of Slaughterhouse-Five) has thumbed its nose at conventional form. But what really matters here, at least philosophically, is free will—that familiar Vonnegut theme. The original novel's premise, Vonnegut tells us, was that "a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum made everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during a past decade, for good or ill."

But the bones of that story—the so-called fictional ingredients of the brew—are not the most savory items. The real pleasure lies in Vonnegut's transforming his continuing interest in the highly suspicious relationship between fact and fiction into the neatest trick yet played on a publishing world consumed with the furor over novel versus memoir. Timequake has parlayed his unworkable novel into a highly entertaining consideration of the relationship between the writer's life and the writer's imagination. Some of its juxtapositions are unsettling, especially the fictional-nonfictional scenes of marriage. Some are hilarious. Much of the autobiographical material appeared in Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death (1991), yet even these reworked scenes seem written here for the first time. The portraits of Vonnegut's first wife and brother, both recently dead, and his sister, long gone, are beautiful, sharp, critical, loving.

"All Vonnegut men," Vonnegut's aunt tells us, "are scared to death of women." The book returns, painfully, relentlessly, to Vonnegut's mother, who committed suicide and who, by his account, was preoccupied with class and money. Her obsession must be terrifying for a highly successful writer who has for years been quoting his own hero, Eugene Debs: "While there is a lower class, I am in it." He quotes his son, Mark, who survived a crackup and is now a pediatrician: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."

I take perfectly seriously Vonnegut's solutions for American society, including his proposed amendment to the Constitution: "Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage." I'm glad he's still going around inventing new forms to contain his vision of a decent society, even if he had to dismember a novel to do it.

At 74, Vonnegut has had enough of the writing life, he tells us in the preface, and Timequake was obviously inspired by his sense that his life's work is winding down. But let me be just the latest to declare that this work has been a blessing. Vonnegut may not have finished the novel, but for a generation of readers he still writes the book.