DATE: Sunday, September 28, 1997            TAG: 9709180487

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON 

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

AFTER SEVEN YEARS, VONNEGUT HASN'T LOST HIS VOICE

TIMEQUAKE

KURT VONNEGUT

Putnam. 240 pp. $23.95.

Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut's 19th book, is his first full-length work of fiction in seven years. It is not the best work Vonnegut has done, but it does offer a few of the pleasures that readers have come to expect from him over the past four decades.

From the beginning of his career, in early science-fiction works such as Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan and in broader satires such as Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut has been a caricaturist, not a creator of character. What readers seemed to appreciate most about his dark satires was not the profound knowledge of character to be found in them but the avuncular reassurance of his comic voice.

His stories were always surreal or reflexive, and his playfully inventive plots rocketed along, fueled by brief, impressionistic scenes. His stories had a quality of philosophical meditation that seemed to be a blend of leg pulling, genuine disgust and sad-eyed compassion. Vonnegut was a word-of-mouth hero during the early '60s, but in 1968, with Slaughterhouse-Five, he was transformed from cult figure to best seller. As a best-selling author, he has written some good books, Jailbird, for instance, but he has also written some bad ones - Breakfast of Champions and Deadeye Dick.

Vonnegut has always sounded like Mark Twain in his later years, the Twain who wrote The Mysterious Stranger, angry but humane, a man capable of suggesting that life amounts to a bad joke but somehow human beings must find a way and a reason to ``dream better dreams.'' Vonnegut has also argued that individuals and groups and countries should believe in the fictions that make for kindness and tolerance and equity.

In Timequake, you hear the best and the worst of Vonnegut. At times he is sharply funny (``For practically everybody, the end of the world can't come soon enough''). At others he is reflexive (``Call me Junior'' - a line that calls to mind both Moby Dick and Cat's Cradle). He can be blunt in his monosyllabic ironies - ``Whatever.'' But he can also be polemical, sentimental and pretty obvious. Nostalgia and irony can, at times, make for strange bedfellows.

``I believe in original sin,'' Vonnegut writes. ``I believe in original virtue. Look around.''

The term ``timequake'' in the novel refers to a 10-year ``rerun'' between 1991 and 2001, a time when everyone's life repeats events that have already occurred during that decade. It's something like a cartoon version of William Butler Yeats' ``gyres.'' The main characters are Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's alter ego, and Vonnegut himself. You could call Timequake science fiction, or you could call it a novel, but I'd call it neither. It's part autobiography, part meditation, part satire. The most satisfying parts are the ones in which Vonnegut writes about his personal life - his brother or first wife, both of whom died of cancer; or his son, who had an emotional breakdown in the '60s.

Vonnegut is at his best in Timequake, not as a novelist, but as an essayist. When he sheds the silly trappings of plot and speaks directly to the reader, his voice is clear, honest and reminiscent of that uncle you wish you had, the one with the gravelly speech and the conspiratorial wink. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old

Dominion University in Norfolk. His latest book is the critical study

``John McPhee.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Kurt Vonnegut

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