It was very interesting to read this book in the wake of the shooting massacre at the Sandy Hook Primary School. Although Hocus Pocus was first published almost a quarter of a century ago, its central themes are still greatly relevant to contemporary American life.
Hocus Pocus is set in the year 2001, eleven years in the future of its actual publication date. It is narrated by Eugene Debs Hartke, who is 61 years of age and is looking back on the events of his life. Hartke tells us of his life as a school child, a professional soldier in the Vietnam War, a school teacher, a prison warder and, finally, a prisoner. Many of the people he knew are dead - most through gunshot wounds, some through cancer, and many that he didn't know also met violent gun-related deaths. Hartke himself directly killed scores of people.
The present action takes place in an economically decaying America. The assets of the country are being sold to the highest bidders, usually Japanese corporations and Arab princes. The prison system has been taken over by the private sector and increasing numbers of Americans, usually blacks and Hispanics, are being incarcerated. Gun ownership has never been higher.
This is a future that Vonnegut did not need to invent. In 1990, Japan had been the rising economic power for the previous thirty years (although its economic growth severely diminished in the 1990s). In the wake of the so-called War on Drugs, incarceration rates in the U.S. increased markedly (from about 500,000 inmates in 1980 to about 2,500,000 inmates in 2010). In response to this, the number of privately operated prisons has increased. Nowadays, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world (0.7%), a rate about five times higher than the U.K., China or Australia. The U.S. also has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world.
It is against this background that Vonnegut explores the human condition. It is in the context of greater crimes that we are shown the small sins and virtues, the hopes and disappointments that make up our lives. Hartke asks:
Who on this Earth hasn't made a mistake or 2?
He also wants to pass on to the young what he has learned about life:
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them ... It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm. It is unfair to youngsters particularly to leave them wholly unprepared for monster screw-ups and starring roles in Keystone Kop comedies and much, much worse.
Of black prisoners, Hartke says:
They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.
This sounds like a good analysis, and it is a sentiment that Michael Moore echoed in one of his films, but I wonder if the belief matches the reality. It certainly doesn't reflect the recent mass shootings, which seems to be white folk killing white folk. I wonder about the 11,000 other gun-related deaths that occurred last year in America?
As is the case in many of Vonnegut's novel's, the narrator's story moves back and forth through time. The language used is simple and direct, and the story is made a little more complex only by the fact that events unfold in a non-chronological sequence. Like in a few of his other works, Vonnegut makes use of some unusual devices. Numbers are written as numerals throughout ('seven' is written as '7'). The various parts of the novel are purported to have been written on many scraps of paper, with each scrap being separated from its predecessor by a solid horizontal line.
In the end, I wonder about this book. On face value it is pessimistic. Taken as a satire, it certainly holds up a mirror to our individual and societal foibles, but it is satire unleavened by any real humor. Even so, I find myself liking this book, although I don't really know why. I suppose it is the pleasure we can get from seeing a master storyteller at work.
I read the Rosettabooks e-book version, which I highly recommend. It is well-formatted and contained only one typo that I noticed.
