HOCUS POCUS
By Kurt Vonnegut
(Jonathan Cape £13.95 )
Hocus Pocus is the latest novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He has written many novels. Most of them since Breakfast Of Champions in very short sentences. In the process, he has permitted a talent which could conceivably have grown into brilliance to deteriorate into mere schtick. Schtick is a Yiddish expression. It means, in this context, a characteristic set of gestures or devices. Vonnegut’s particular schtick is the use of the faux-naif voice to illustrate a fatalist view of the random cruelty and suicidal foolishness of this universe and most of its inhabitants. Here he does it again. His hero is named after the American socialist Eugene Debs. As an army officer, he was the last American to leave Saigon. His wife suffers from hereditary insanity and his children can never forgive their parents for reproducing. He becomes a college professor. Then a jailbird. Then, through a series of standardised Vonnegutian schticks, the leader of a prison revolt. Some of it is as civilised and funny as Vonnegut at his best. Some of it is as irritating and teeth-grindingly twee as Vonnegut at his worst. This is always a problem with new novels by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. So it goes. And goes. And goes.
Time Out, 1990
