Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake (Putnam; 219 pages; $23.95) is a salvage job, a reprocessing of what the author calls the "best parts" of an unpublished novel that did not work. This revision is a mix of autobiographical bits, plot concepts, barbershop cynicism and romantic idealism, all loosely tied together by a standard science-fiction device: on Feb. 13, 2001, a quirk in space-time flips the calendar back 10 years to Feb. 17, 1991. From that moment, everyone in the world is fated to repeat the decade in every living detail...
...Having a novelist's free hand to write what you will does not mean you are entitled to a free ride. Vonnegut, soon to be 75, struggled too long for his success to be naive on that point. But in a sorrowful preface he says Timequake is his last novel and asks readers to "have pity...
That is not the way it works, especially when so many of today's good, unknown writers can't get a first novel published. Besides, seeking sympathy from a book reviewer is like asking a buzzard to have table manners...
Caleb Carr's gaslit narrative style has gained a touch of weight since his agreeable turn-of-the-century detective novel The Alienist (1994), but perhaps no more than success justifies. The reader is inclined to nod indulgently--at the new novel's 629 pages, at the rustle of the writer's smoking jacket and at the swirl of the great man's brandy. That's the illusion--author as Basil Rathbone--that Carr, 42, persuades us to believe...
...large number of children, including at least three of her own. And here is where the plot seems a bit askew. As in real life, Darrow is a passionate death-penalty opponent. If he loses, his thoroughly guilty client goes to the electric chair. Just deserts aside, the novel has clip-clopped along too jocularly for too many chapters for this to be an acceptable outcome. Well, can the child killer go free? Perish forbid. Therefore...