Book Review

Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

     I hate to say anything bad about a Kurt Vonnegut novel but Hocus Pocus was not one of his best. The narrative is written in the non-linear style that has become a Vonnegut trademark. The main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, is a typical Vonnegut protagonist too. The story also fits in neatly with the kind of satirical poke at modern society that you would expect. Overall though, the novel suffers because the actual theme of the book is unclear.

Eugene Debs Hartke, like so many other characters created by this author, is a mediocrity with some ironic eccentricities. As a teenager, he gets humiliated when his father, employed as an engineer, does his science fair project and tries to trick everybody into thinking it was the work of young Eugene. The boy later goes on to a military academy and gets shipped off to duty as a mid-level commanding officer in the Vietnam War. When he returns he becomes a professor of physics and music appreciation at a college that caters to children with learning disabilities who come from wealthy families. Located on one of the Finger Lakes south of Rochester, New York (my hometown), the college sits on the shore opposite a prison. As the story goes, Hartke gets fired from his job and goes to work as a teacher in the prison. But one night there is a jailbreak, and a gang of prisoners escape and take over the college during the winter break between semesters. Hartke, sympathetic to the prisoners who he teaches, joins them and tries to act as a negotiator between them and the authorities. But the result is that Hartke gets arrested for assisting them instead.

As a character study, the portrayal of Eugene Debs Hartke has some strengths and weaknesses. He is written about with irony and humor, some of which really delivers, while he tries to navigate a world where circumstances are never in his favor and mostly beyond his control, the quintessential existentialist non-hero. He is halfway in between a bumbling mediocrity and a man destined for greatness. On one hand, he becomes famous in Vietnam for giving powerful pep talks while on the other hand he realizes the pointlessness of the whole war. His speeches are nonsense but they fool people into not giving up. He appears to be destined for an important role in activism and reform, hence his name being that of the historical socialist labor union leader, but his attempts at being a Vietnam War critic and being an effective leader in the prison only bring him failure and humiliation. He later gets fired by the conservative, right wing board of directors at the university for his comments which get recorded by a student with a hidden tape recorder. Hartke is also a chronic womanizer, keeping a list of all the women he has slept with along side a list of all the people he killed, directly or indirectly, as a member of the US military. This contrasts with his benevolent role as a husband who takes care of his wife and her mother, both of them living in his house and both of them suffering from mental illness.

Some of the novel suffers from lack of detail. We learn that his wife and her mother are mentally ill but we never learn what their mental illness is. Hartke also never reconciles the conflicting thoughts he has about the prisoners; he sympathizes with them, trying to be their educator and mentor, but he also points out that they are guilty of terrible crimes like murder and rape. He never does any authentic soul searching to reconcile this conflict. He feels sorry for them simply because they are prisoners and mostly non-white. The motivation behind his thinking never gets clarified.

The theme of parallels is also not fully examined. One parallel is the two worlds of the university and the prison. This contrasts a world of freedom with a world of restraint, but the purpose of the contrast is not explicitly spelled out. You might deduce that the university is more like a prison since Hartke is not able to express his freedom to critique America there, and the prison is more like a university since that is where he finds the most success and personal satisfaction as a teacher. Another parallel is the list of people Hartke killed and the women he has slept with. Neither accomplishment is anything admirable. He feels ashamed for having killed people in Vietnam and, even worse, American society hated him for it when he returned. Then he loses his job for speaking out against the war. As a chronic womanizer, he also sees how he has become more well-known on campus for his promiscuity and his reputation has suffered because of the women he has hurt with his insensitivity. Having seduced the university president’s wife, he also suffers because this is used as another reason for him to be fired. But none of this is directly stated and it may not have even been the author’s intended purpose in writing about them.

Then there is all the other “stuff” in the book. I put the word “stuff” in quotation marks because a lot of it just seems like extra, arbitrary, generic add-ons that don’t contribute anything useful or necessary to the overall narrative. There are things like a Mercedes that Hartke received as a gift from a student and one he rarely drives because it keeps getting vandalized, a woman’s disastrous art show in Buffalo, a computer that can predict the course of people’s lives based on their current circumstances, a skull found buried on campus, and even the Tralfamadorians put in an appearance. They show up in a science-fiction story published in a porn magazine which explains that they have chosen humans as vectors to spread germs throughout the universe. As usual, Vonnegut reminds us that, if there is any purpose to human existence, it is something so mundane, so not obvious, and so meaningless to us that we can never comprehend it. But why are these things even in the story? They seem like extraneous information and it even appears that Vonnegut himself could never be satisfied with his own work unless he mentions the Tralfamadorians whether doing so made sense or not.

Even more to the author’s discredit is the complete lack of emotional affect that characterizes Eugene Debs Hartke. Despite everything that happens to him, he proceeds throughout most of the novel without showing any signs of pain, frustration, anger, joy, confusion, pride, or anything thing else that an ordinary person might feel throughout the course of their lives. Then again, writing characters that had emotional depth was never a strong point of Vonnegut’s to begin with, despite any other legitimate claims to genius he might otherwise have.

Aside from being a flawed character study of Eugene Debs Hartke, I think Vonnegut’s intentions in this novel are to, first, write a zeitgeist piece about the apocalyptic end of the 20^th century, and second, to show how language can be deceptive. In the former case, the novel is fairly successful. Japanese businessmen have bought out most American corporations including the for-profit prison across from the university. The economy is in ruins. The fuel supply is dwindling. The environment is destroyed. Racism and social injustice have become predominant to the point where nothing really matters anymore. This theme is not entirely successful though because the author tries to comment on too much. It reads like he had a checklist of things rhat have gone wrong and he was sure to check every box as he wrote regardless of how well the criticisms fit into the narrative. But at least the book has a left wing political bent as it should while simultaneously showing the ineffectiveness of liberal politics in a society full of stupid conservative people. The latter theme of language was not given enough attention to fully work. The title specifically refers to the meeting that Hartke has with the college board in which they give reasons for his dismissal. The reasons they give are nothing more than a smokescreen, just some hocus pocus to distract him from the real reasons they have for terminating his professorship. Also the speeches Hartke gives in Vietnam are nothing but hocus pocus, sleight if mind designed to distract the soldiers from thinking about the absurdity of the war. Hartke also uses lies and deception to seduce women, promising the president’s wife a trip to Venice to get her into bed. Vonnegut is telling us that society is nothing but bullshit since truth and honesty get nothing accomplished while deceit leads to results every time. He doesn’t develop this theme to completion, though, so it winds up being an obscure point.

It is easy for the main ideas to become obscure in Hocus Pocus. Kurt Vonnegut bombards us with so much information it is hard to pick out what he intends to say or at least what he is prioritizing. This approach works well with maximalist novelists like Joyce and Pynchon, but in this case Vonnegut’s end of-career novel comes off as bloated, overbearing, and without any definite direction. There are just too many threads and most of them are loose. Or is that the intention? This is a work of postmodernism so all I can say is maybe. In any case, it is far from Kurt Vonnegut’s best work. It isn’t a terrible book either; I just don’t think it is worth reading more than once. By the time he wrote this, he had already earned his stature as one of America’s greatest writers so it probably doesn’t matter much anyways.