[In the following review, Montrose characterizes Hocus Pocus as a novelized essay and praises Vonnegut's masterful style.]

Hocus Pocus presents a dystopian America where the future (2001) is like the present, only more so. Everything has worsened: the economy, the ravaging of natural resources, crime, the drugs problem, urban decay, poverty. Petrol and food are rationed. The rich have sold Big Business to foreigners and live off the proceeds. The only surviving "American enterprises" are Mafia-controlled. Nor is public property exempt. National Forests have been sold to a Swedish timber corporation; prisons are run, for profit, by the Japanese (they have, however, declined to take over innercity schools). The novel, like most of Kurt Vonnegut's since Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), takes the form of a grimly comic autobiography replete with vicissitudes, guilt and futility: life as a cruel joke. The autobiographer, Eugene Debs Hartke, recounts his story while awaiting trial for organizing the biggest prison break in American history.

Like most Vonnegut heroes, Hartke is beset by fate, inadvertently becoming first a career soldier, then a teacher. As a much-decorated officer in Vietnam, he was nicknamed "The Preacher", so adept was he at delivering "lethal hocus pocus", the official lies which justified the war to his men (who "died for other people's vanity and foolishness"), the press and television. As a professor at a college in upstate New York for the "learning-disabled … plain stupid or comatose" offspring of the wealthy, he turns into an enemy of what Vonnegut once termed "the American way of thinking about America", debunking the self-seeking myths of the "Ruling Class". Eventually, he is summarily fired after falling foul of a right-wing television and newspaper pundit. This reverse saves his life: he obtains (by chance, naturally) a residential post at the nearby maximum security prison (whose Warden survived Hiroshima) and thus avoids the bloodshed which ensues after the convicts, all black, break out and overrun the college and surrounding town. Hartke is accused, falsely, of masterminding the escape, because of his reputation and because the authorities believe that "Black people couldn't mastermind anything". Obviously, he will be found guilty.

To some extent, Vonnegut is, like Gore Vidal, an anti-historian of America, undermining popular fictions, removing varnish and inserting warts—although his methods are quite different (Vidal offers detailed portraits, Vonnegut lightning sketches). Here, Vonnegut condemns the "Ruling Class" as greedy, hypocritical and hubristic. He also despairs of mankind as a species, notably its capacity for vainglory and destructiveness. In his finest novel, The Sirens of Titan, he derided that former trait by portraying the whole of human history as having been manipulated to assist an inconsequential mission by an alien creature. In Hocus Pocus, a short story by an anonymous writer (Kilgore Trout, surely) posits that humans were developed by "intelligent threads of energy trillions of light-years long" solely to devise survival tests for germs, the true "darlings of the Universe".

Derided, also, is the human propensity for ruining the planet while arguing about the costs of rectifying matters. A minor character proposes that a gigantic epitaph be carved in the Grand Canyon "for the flying-saucer people to find … WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP". Only he didn't say "doggone", adds Hartke, who eschews, "obscenity" throughout since it entitles "people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears an eyes to you".

To varying degrees, from Breakfast of Champions (1973) onwards, the purpose of Vonnegut's novels has been moral instruction. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in that. Unfortunately, these later novels have had little to match the quirky invention of the best of Vonnegut's earlier work—The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five—while characterization has thinned to the point where Hocus Pocus almost resembles a novelized essay; one set of colourless mouthpieces utters Vonnegut's sentiments, another provides those to be demolished. Fortunately Vonnegut remains an effectual stylist, combining deadpan irony and faux naïveté. As usual, his central narrative winds through a mosaic of aphorisms, verbal tics, digressions, homilies, obscure facts. Familiar ingredients reappear: hereditary insanity (Hartke's wife and mother-in-law are afflicted), obesity, suicides and outlandish deaths, war, outrageous fortune (even multi-millionaires are but a swift plot-twist away from penury), man-made catastrophes, white-collar crime, alcoholism…. This compendium of devices and concerns may have hardened into a formula, but it has not yet ceased to be a diverting one.