BOOK REPORT: HOCUS POCUS BY KURT VONNEGUT

I DON'T THINK I CAN DO JUSTICE IN ANY REVIEW OF Hocus Pocus, so I won’t (mostly) try. I had a stack of books I'd gotten from the library that were sitting on my night table to help stretch out the hours until I fall asleep. I'm a bit of a night-hawk these days, mainly because I don’t like going to sleep due to the fact that I have to wake up. So I read to distract myself from myself. Till around 3am as a rule. Anyway, I had a couple of detective novels and Hocus Pocus sitting there. I read about fifty pages of this absolutely mammoth Swedish police procedural (in translation). The author kept introducing character after character, over and over, with a murdered body or two tossed in (including characters from the Seventeenth Century for some reason). It was like when you're trying to start your car on a really cold morning. The engine is just about to turn over, you think. One more try! And then it doesn’t. But you keep turning the key, hoping against hope it will start and you won’t need a boost. I kept waiting for the story to turn over, but the more I read, the more I hoped the serial killer would just murder everyone. At that point, I knew it was time to drop it, which is something I don’t normally do; I usually hang onto a book for dear life! (And I’m glad I didn’t drop that lead-bottomed tome on my tootsie! It musta been 800 pages. What was I thinking? Bigger is better, I suppose. Not so. Oh, so not so!)

The next book I started was an American detective yarn, I think written by an ex-cop. It started out with the chief detective at the police station. I was on the right track! Or so I thought. Somehow, for some reason, the detective goes off on some kind of erotic thought process and the next thing I know, I’m being subjected to a sex scene—some memory or daydream —that the dick is having at the office, something I’m sure we all do quite often during the course of our workday. But, folks, it’s really hard to write convincingly about sex. Sorry for my potty-mouth but you know the drill: introductions, drinking, groping, undress, caress and finesse (usually not the last bit). Lovey-dovey, kissy-smooches, rubber lips and gorging tips! Then, thank god, it’s over. Done.

Reading suchlike reminds me of seeing Granddad in the buff. It's something I’ve spent my life trying to forget. And as for middle-aged white guys writing about the old ‘in-out, in-out’, they should try writing about paint drying; it would be a safer and less embarrassing topic for them to wax poetic over. A lot of these guys write about sex as if as if they’re shell-shocked or else underwater in a bathysphere, staring through a porthole at all strange fish out there. Yep, I dropped that one onto the pile for a fast return the next day to the library.

Three strikes and it’s good night, Irene. So, I picked up Hocus Pocus in a last-ditch effort to keep me awake and away from my appointed hour of sleep. When I began the opening chapter, where the main character is named after American socialist, union leader and presidential candidate of the early Twentieth Century Eugene Debs, I knew I was off to a good start. The first few pages gave me that  “Ah!” moment and all the tension in my neck (and arms, back and butt) dissolved with the salve of Vonnegut’s wit, wisdom and compassion. By the way, the word, “hocus pocus” is used a couple of times in the story, and it’s code for “BS”.
In his thoughts on Vietnam, “Gene” reflects that he was a “genius of lethal hocus pocus,” (154) and wonders how many troops died as a result of the speeches he gave motivating the newly-arrived recruits. How many “…died as an indirect result of all my hocus pocus, all my blah blah blah.” (155) The story is of Gene as he remembers his life and records it while imprisoned at his former posh New England college, now converted into a maximum security prison. The book is full of Vonnegut’s rich gift for satire, observation and commentary. His asides and quirky take on life and the foibles of humankind are like a slap across the face with a wet fish! They make you sit up and pay attention.  Gene is a Vietnam vet turned college prof writing in 2001 (HP was published in 1990) about an America divided by race, class and wealth. It is a country tottering on its last legs, indebted, ‘cored out’ and owned by foreign interests (sound familiar?), and Vonnegut speaks though Gene about the strange and unpredictable world around him.

There is much magic to be found here.
Cheers

"I know I should be paying more attention. But I'm so scared!"