Hocus Pocus

It usually takes me two or three sittings to breeze through a Vonnegut book. They're all around 250 to 350 pages long and since the author's style is always straightforward and frank, I can usually bang his novels out in a day or two, maybe a week tops. That just wasn't the case with Hocus Pocus, a 320-page book written in a straightforward and frank manner that, for whatever reason, I could only seem to get through 20 or 30 pages of at a time. I've been chipping away at this one for three or four weeks now, and it took an hour and a half on a plane for me to just finish it off once and for all. Needless to say, the story never really pulled me in. This isn't the first Vonnegut book to leave me unimpressed in the story department; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano were also guilty of that crime, and they happen to be my two least favorite Vonnegut novels. But I'm not ready to call this one a disappointment. In fact, it contained some of the best individual lines and paragraphs Vonnegut has ever written. This was his penultimate novel, and by far his most cold and cynical. He's often pessimistic about the 20th century follies and atrocities of mankind, but he usually hides any outright contempt behind a glossy and numb sort of apathy - the "so it goes" mentality, if you will. But this time, Vonnegut is firing off in all directions and his wit is as sharp as it's ever been. He hits on all sorts of specific running themes here - Vietnam, racism, slavery, academic elites, prison riots - and what the book lacks in cohesive story it makes up for in razor sharp wit. The usual party line with Vonnegut might be something like, "Gosh, people sure do some nasty things to each other," but here that's been honed down to something more like, "Oh, fuck everyone." If I hadn't known better I'd have said Joseph Heller wrote this book, and not Kurt Vonnegut. (Actually, Heller called it Vonnegut's best work, so there you go.) At the end of the day I don't know where to place this one in my overall ranking of Vonnegut's novels. Story-wise, it's bottom three, but memorable moments-wise, it's top five, and putting it in the middle seems less like a compromise than a dishonest cop out. I guess that dilemma describes my feelings for this book more than any definitive rating could. We'll leave it at that. But before I go, I've got to share some of my favorite zingers from Hocus Pocus.

The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them. Look at it go!

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator. The people down here just ate that up!

Any form of government, not just Capitalism, is whatever people who have all our money, drunk or sober, sane or insane, decide to do today.

Being an American means never having to say you're sorry.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

During my three years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not one of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

The martyrs at the Alamo had died for the right to own Black slaves. They didn’t want to be a part of Mexico anymore because it was against the law in that country to own slaves of any kind. I don’t think Wilder knew that. Not many people in this country do. I certainly never heard that at the Academy. I wouldn’t have known that slavery was what the Alamo was all about if Professor Stern the unicyclist hadn’t told me so. No wonder there were so few Black tourists at the Alamo!

Doesn't that all just make you feel so shitty? Awesome, right?