Hocus Pocus was arguably Kurt Vonnegut’s last proper novel. Published in 1990, it’d be followed by 1997’s Timequake, an odd mix of novel, memoir, and essay. Hocus Pocus, by contrast, has a coherent story told through the form of an autobiography written by a man in prison.
It’s clearly a Kurt Vonnegut novel. Familiar Vonnegutisms abound. Odd typographical conventions, such as never spelling out numbers but presenting them as numerical digits (like “1” or “2”). A graphic component, with occasional drawings of tombstones. And references to past novels, with Paul Slazinger from 1987’s Bluebeard a minor character, and a story-within-the-story presenting a new version of Vonnegut’s recurring aliens the Tralfamadorians.
Beyond the memoir structure and a fascination with prison and punishment, the book deals with the falsity of language and the inequities of 20th-century America. Those themes are extended in new ways, to explore the inability of language to describe war, the structural inequalities of higher education, and how political beliefs get in the way of perceiving truth.
As with a lot of Vonnegut’s novels, the reader interest comes less from finding out what happens next than from knowing the end of the main character’s story, and finding out how he got there and why. Pieces of story are given in more-or-less chronological order but with heavy foreshadowing. And we wonder how much to trust the man telling us the tale.
The narrator in this case is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam veteran, teacher, and former propagandist. Hartke, named for the great American socialist, serves in Vietnam through to 1975, then leaves the military to teach at a private college in upstate New York near a private prison and a town named Athena. When he’s eventually fired, Hartke gets a job at the prison. And then, several years later, there’s a mass breakout from the prison, with terrible consequences for the town and college.
Hartke’s writing in the aftermath of the resolution of the mass escape and subsequent occupation of the college by the inmates. That takes place in 2001, more than a decade after the time of the book’s publication. This is near-future science fiction, in which Vonnegut depicts an America whose fabric and infrastructure is crumbling: “a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor.”
Hartke remembers Paul Slazinger reflecting that in America “nobody ever gets punished for anything,” especially the ruling class who loots the government and lets infrastructure collapse. There’s much of the near-future America of the book that’s familiar. A few things are close but slightly off—Korea’s a major economic power before it actually happens; Japan’s economy continues to skyrocket rather than level off; the world’s facing climate change in the form of a new ice age rather than global warming.
College, prison, and town are separate communities with separate class structures and ethnicities—the private prison’s bought by the Japanese, who import their people to run it, and since in this 2001 Supreme Court decisions have segregated American prisons, all the inmates are Black. The town’s full of poor to middle-class white people, while the college is a mostly-white sampling of America’s wealthy elite.
Hartke doesn’t fit in at the college, to hear him tell it. In another prescient moment, he’s fired because a right-wing TV personality has his daughter tape Hartke in and out of class, then uses his asides and unguarded statements to convince the college that Hartke’s anti-American. That Hartke’s been screwing the wife of the college President is also a factor, though, so here as elsewhere, you’re encouraged to wonder how much his recollections are honest.
The title of the book comes halfway through the novel when Hartke reflects on the words he used when he was in Public Information in the Vietnam war: “lethal hocus pocus.” He says elsewhere, “I used to find it easy and even exhilarating to lie,” and “during my final year in Vietnam, … I found it as natural as breathing to tell the press and replacements fresh off the boats or planes that we were clearly winning, and that the folks back home should be proud and happy about all the good things we were doing there.”
Language is a con, a magic act, but one with fatal consequences. Possibly Hartke’s so disgusted with the language of his past he’s resolved to be honest here. He says he doesn’t lie anymore. Still, you wonder. He doesn’t write much in detail about Vietnam. Is he writing to evade those memories?
Hocus Pocus is almost eerily accurate about the future; and I haven’t mentioned the proto-AI that takes in information about people and spits out statistically-averaged hypothetical lives they might’ve lived. The book’s another strong late-Vonnegut novel, about community and human relationships and untrustworthy words. Its main flaw is that it imagines a right-wing TV personality who has the courage of his convictions, unlike the grifters who dominate politics. This is the ultimate testament to Vonnegut’s humanism: he’s not cynical enough about the people he opposes.