Hocus Pocus is the tenth book in Rachel’s Best Vonnegut Reading Order. (But I’m reading it as #11 because I cheated and read Mother Night early. I know, I know. May curses rain down upon me.)
I’ll give it to you straight: I almost didn’t finish this book. Almost.
Don’t worry, don’t worry! Of course I didn’t forget about the promise I made to finish all Vonnegut’s novels (for the record, that promise was made after the Player Piano Incident). It’s just that Hocus Pocus made it nearly impossible to keep that promise, is all.
I still don’t know what this book is about. (That is to say, I could tell you a number of things that were in it, but what it’s about? In a reasonably coherent fashion? I’ve got bupkis.) “Giving a plot summary of a Vonnegut novel is a little like trying to lasso fireworks,” said Jerry Johnston of Deseret News in a book review of Hocus Pocus. How right that man was. But, like him, I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
Our narrator is named Eugene Debs Hartke. He was named for the American socialist and activist Eugene Debs, one of Vonnegut’s personal heroes. Gene’s story takes place in 2001, even though Hocus Pocus was written in 1990. Gene has had a lot of interesting jobs: general in the Vietnam War, physics professor at an institution for the mentally disabled called Tarkington College, a prison warden. He’s now a prisoner himself, dying of tuberculosis while awaiting his trial. What did he do? Read to find out.
Of course, there’s a chance you may not remember by the time you finish the book. Vonnegut, as readers of Slaughterhouse-Five will remember, is known for his casual treatment of time. In Hocus Pocus, we hop back and forth between Gene’s early married life, his time at war, his time as a teacher, and his time as a prisoner. And not necessarily in that order, of course. I almost couldn’t take it, but I forced myself through it only to find that by the end, I didn’t hate it anymore. I don’t know if I necessarily liked it, either, but that’s okay. Really.
Since this is such a chaotic book, I’ll list off some of my favorite parts of it in a chaotic fashion:
- Have you ever had a relative with Alzheimer’s disease who didn’t know who you were 90% of the time, but that 10% when they remembered who you were and what you liked to do in your free time and how burned you liked your toast in the morning just made you want to cry and never stop? There’s a part like that in here. Gene’s wife, Margaret, goes insane late in life due to unfortunate genes passed down from her mother. Around page 250, she does something she hasn’t done in years. She calls her husband by his name.
- Late in the book, Gene gets to talk to someone he hasn’t seen in a long time. (I am moving mountains to prevent spoilers here, so please please please do not ask me who it is.) The last thing the person asks Gene is whether or not the nearby gas station has chocolate. I don’t know why that gets to me so much, but it does.
- This novel, plot spaghetti aside, is a show-and-tell of Vonnegut’s skill with words. Vonnegut often said critics hated him because they thought he was too stupid to know long words, and it’s true that he doesn’t use them much, but when he does, my goodness me! He uses the word “absquatulated” in this book. It means to do anything in a hurry, but usually to leave. “Absquatulated”! Roll it over your tongue a few times! Is it not among the most divine of alphabetical arrangements? It’s certainly one of my favorites. Until now, I had never seen it used anywhere outside the annals of dictionaries. And “defenestrated”! What a perfectly lovely and sophisticated way of putting it! Anyone else would just say “threw it out the window.”
Emma’s Overall Reaction: It would take a special kind of person to truly love Hocus Pocus. I hope that person has found this book and gobbled it down. However, that person is not me.
Perhaps you are that special person yourself! You’ll never know if you don’t read the book. Buy it here.
