Get old, get sad

Thoughts on Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

“Get old, get sad,” said Fielding Roebuck when I saw him give a speech at the American Writers and Artists Institute conference at the Marriott in Delray Beach, Florida, back in 2010.

I remember thinking at the time he had hit the nail on the head with that. Couldn’t deny it. As you tot up the years, it’s only natural you tot up the regrets too.

Wise words from a wise man.

So it goes.

But get this: Fielding Roebuck doesn’t exist. I made him up for the purposes of this piece. He never said, “get old, get sad.” The words never passed his lips. He doesn’t have lips. Doesn’t even have a mouth, which does wonders for his diet.

I had Roebuck temporarily exist and say “get old, get sad” in the opening line of this piece so I could deliver my thoughts about Timequake, Vonnegut’s final novel, in a more interesting way. Some — if they were being kind — would say I’ve opened this piece in a way not unlike how Vonnegut himself might.

Hi-ho.

At the heart of Timequake is the idea that there is a big bang in 2001 — a “timequake” — which sends everyone back to 1991 and forces them to live 1991 to 2001 again exactly the same, like deja vu, losing the option of free will.

So, let’s rewind: back to the start of this piece, or to 2010 in Delray Beach, Florida, and rerun it.

Though I didn’t ever see a man called Fielding Roebuck give a speech at the American Writers and Artists Institute conference at the Marriott, I did see plenty of other folks give speeches in Delray Beach, Florida. In 2010, possibly. Or 2014. It’s not important. Did I see them speak at something called the American Writers and Artists Institute conference? It kinda sounds made up. But it could be real. Some people will know. Some people won’t. That’s kinda the point. That’s what’s important about Vonnegut, it’s what he does.

***

The Marriott is a nice hotel. I remember the wooden swing doors in the toilet. Secure, yet somehow risqué too. The paper towels. The wicker bin to throw them in. Smiling at the other delegates in the wide mirror, nodding at their lanyard — you’re here for the conference too?

***

The Marriott. Naming the town and state — Delray Beach, Florida. These are the real, biographical details that give Vonnegut his authentic charm. Yet somehow the details are still strangely disassociated, giving it all a fictional quality. It’s an aloof honesty. Authenticity despite itself.

And the juxtaposition of the imagined and real, the real that could be imagined, the imagined that could be real — my Fielding Roebuck a stand-in for Vonnegut’s alter-ego Kilgore Trout, my AWAI conference a stand-in for the clambake he has all his characters meet at. These are the unexpected juxtapositions that wrestle at the heart of Timequake.

But whereas in earlier novels Vonnegut’s unexpected juxtapositions are all designed to create humor, here — in what I believe he intended to be his farewell to the novel form — the juxtaposition of real and imagined is trained entirely on achieving gravity.

And boy does Vonnegut get some gravity going here! Gravitas muchatas. Perhaps there’s a little too much gravity. “Overwhelming gravity,” carefully pronounces a jungle-trapped Werner Herzog just out of shot.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of humor. There’s a lot of Vonnegut’s wonderful silliness. But in the end, it’s drowned by the pure fucking sadness that floods from the page and rushes you into a grey, steely sea of sloshing sorrow (the waves crashing so loud you can’t hear my terrible alliteration).

And to boot: it’s all made infinitely sadder by reading the book not in 1997 when he published it and when the world was already suffering plenty, but in 2024, nearly thirty years later, so you have the added “rerun” quality of realizing the world hasn’t really shifted at all. It’s still pretty damn bleak. Ugh.

All this to say it’s a great book. I mean, it’s Vonnegut, and by this point in my recent obsession with the man, I believe he was a genius — one of the best American writers of the 20th century. But yeah, like Fielding Roebuck never said:

“Get old, get sad.”

And don’t it suck, says I.

Hi-ho.

My recommendation: Find a park bench, layer up — whatever the weather — and don’t stop reading until the pigeons embrace you as a friend. The world is around you folks, it’s all around you.