In his novels and lectures, Vonnegut has long promoted artificial extended families as a way to create bonds and assuage alienation between people. Vonnegut's fans — and I, despite my critical reservations, consider myself one — form such a family. To this clan, Vonnegut is like an amusing uncle who visits from Minneapolis every few years. Picking up a new Vonnegut or returning to an old one, is like spending time with funny, cranky old Uncle Kurt. Even at his most disappointing, he inspires a certain fondness and familial devotion. You'd hardly reject your uncle just because he rambles a bit or repeats himself, would you?

In Timequake, Vonnegut's musings on life, with the recurring theme that "the most highly evoloved Earthling creatures fund being alive embarrassing or much worse," are shaded with more grimness than before, as if Vonnegut is bending under the weight of the thoughts that once buoyed up his work. The upside is that he has blended fable and memoir more intricately and playfully than ever before. In his essayistic interludes and insertion of himslef into his narratives, Vonnegut is a sort of poor-man's Milan Kundera; in Timequake, the levels of reality blend more smoothly and pointedly than in any of his novels since Slaughterhouse-Five.

For diehard Vonnegut fans, Timequake is an essential, if none too artistically rigorous, footnote to his career.

In one sense, it seems natural to let Vonnegut retire. Turning 75 on November 11, and with 19 volumes of "curious tales told with ink on bleached and flattened wood pulp" behind him, he's earned a rest, and has left more work that do most writers. But the desultory pleasures Timequake offers are tempered by the knowledge that this is to be his last book — knowledge that usually comes only with a writer's death.

Goodbye, Uncle Kurt. We will miss you.