[In the review below, Garrett claims that in Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut returns to the high quality of his earlier works.]

Once upon a time, I, too, was a Vonnegut groupie. In that world, which every day seems a little better than this one, we waited, eager and conspiratorial, for the man who had written the short stories later collected in Canary in a Cat House (1961) and the novel Player Piano (1952) to bring out his next book. We few. We happy few.

There was a little wait before that marvelous and wacko novel The Sirens of Titan (1959) appeared, offering the wild and woolly and deterministic adventures of one Malachi Constant, his wife Beatrice Rumsfoord and their little boy, Chrono. And best of all, it introduced us to what was to become Vonnegut's outer space Yoknapatawpha—the planet Tralfamadore, "where the flying saucers came from."

Next we were blessed with Mother Night (1962) and its impeccable moral—"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be;" Cat's Cradle (1963), featuring the inimitable Dr. Felix Hoenikker and his three odd children; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), which introduced us to one of Vonnegut's most enduring characters—sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout.

So far he had endured the services of four casual publishers, very few reviews, next to no money from his writing; and we, his devoted readers, still knew most of each other by name. We knew next to nothing then about Vonnegut's private life, with its full share, and then some, of trouble and woe and even tragedy. But we loved his bleak, black, essentially sophomoric and sentimental humor, and we rejoiced in the crazy quilt of mordant fun and games that was a novel created by him.

Then some strange things happened, beginning with a piece by critic Robert Scholes—"'Mithridates, He Died Old': Black Humor and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."—and leading, swiftly enough, to a new publisher, a new novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) that rose to No. 1 on the bestseller list and became a popular movie in 1972. And so to riches, fame and almost overnight, as these things go, to a bulging six-foot shelf of books and articles all about Vonnegut, his texts and subtexts, signs and symbols, sneaky similes and sly metaphors. He looks likely to be the last American literary "discovery" of this century, a star of first magnitude, soon a public figure, yet one more highly regarded and well-rewarded sage in residence.

Then it seemed to us, his old and longtime fans, that he started acting and writing like a sage, too, sounding more and more like some kind of weird cross between former senator Eugene McCarthy and that ancient and indefatigable flower child, the Maharishi. And so as the new books came along, nine by my count, we shrugged and yawned and went our separate ways. I remember laughing out loud when I looked among the cook books in our local bookstore and found Breakfast of Champions (1973).

Then please come home, old fans, and gather around, you new ones. With Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut seems to have rediscovered himself. The book purports to be the autobiographical manuscript of one Eugene Debs Hartke (the book is dedicated to his namesake, Eugene Victor Debs, 1855–1926), West Pointer, Vietnam veteran ("If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being, there would be little pictures of people painted all over me."); former college professor at Tarkington College, a school mainly for the dyslexic and learning disabled, where there is a Pahlavi Pavilion, a Somoza Hall, a Vonnegut Memorial Fountain, and a remarkably imaginative computer called Griot; a teacher at Athena, a prison run, like much else in America, by the Japanese Army of Occupation in Business Suits; and now, himself, a prisoner awaiting trial for his part in the largest prison breakout in American history.

Although the story ranges freely in time covering all of Hartke's life and a good deal of our history, it is set in the amazing literary year of 2001. (Hartke saw the movie in Vietnam.) Now he finds himself "in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor."

In this new/old world I.G. Farben owns Du Pont, Italians own Anheuser-Busch, President Mobutu of Zaire has bought an ice-cream company in San Diego, the Sultan of Brunei has the First National Bank of Rochester, N.Y., the Shah of Bratpuhr controls meatpacking in Dubuque and the Encyclopedia Britannica is "owned by a mysterious Egyptian arms dealer living in Switzerland."

For consolation, Hartke has his memories, good and bad, a wealth of events and an album of major and minor and always memorable characters, including, too briefly, a mortician named Norman Updike. And he has some useful books—The Atheist's Bible, Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" as well as the old magazine Black Garterbelt, which has a story in it, "The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore," which argues that "the whole point of life on Earth was to make germs shape up so that they would be ready to ship out when the time came" and that human beings in the cosmic scheme of things are only "germ hotels."

The form of any Vonnegut novel always has some new wrinkles. According to "K. V." who merely edited this book, Hartke is writing it down "in pencil on everything from brown wrapping paper to the backs of business cards." Adding: "The unconventional lines separating passages within chapters indicate where one scrap heap ended and the next began. The shorter the passage, the smaller the scrap." Some scraps are a phrase or one word only, others go on for pages. There are other idiosyncrasies of text, including the author's flat refusal to use "foul language," leading to many a strained euphemism, all of them adding to Vonnegut's familiar and inimitably goofy charm.

Form and content, Hocus Pocus is a classic—weird, but good. We are older and so is he more relaxed and tolerant, if not one bit kinder and gentler, and as funny as anybody in the funny business.

The moral? Read Vonnegut's lips: "Just because we can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."