[In the following review, Bell argues that the narrative of Hocus Pocus becomes secondary to themes that Vonnegut wishes to discuss.]

Here comes another of Vonnegut's exemplary tales about one man unravelling the tangle of his life and trying to find out What Really Happened. It is full of wit, humanity, cruelty and trite narrative devices.

This time, as editor 'KV' explains, the imprisoned hero has committed his story to scraps of paper, thus allowing scope for the elliptical, the gnomic and the discursive. Often, these entries are one-sentence paragraphs.

'Vietnam.'

That's one. Eugene Debs Hartke, a West Pointer named after the only socialist ever to mount a real challenge for the presidency, was in charge of the helicopter evacuation from the US embassy in Saigon. His experience of war looms large as memory and metaphor.

'Losers!'

That's another entry. Hocus Pocus is composed of defeats. In 2001 the United States is foreign-owned, its ecology ruined, its economy shattered. Most of the book's characters are mad (Hartke's wife and mother-in-law), sad (his many lovers), drunk (ditto), drugged (America in general), suicidal (any character impeding the narrative) or affectless. The remainder are the Ruling Class, the rich who sold out to the Japanese and who, squatting on their assets, treat their fellow Americans as aliens.

They run Tarkington College, where Hartke finds a job teaching their idiot children until he is implicated in the biggest jail-break in history. The college serves for a satire on the education industry, with its Pahlavi pavilion, Samoza Hall and Vonnegut Memorial Fountain. The racially segregated, profit-making Sony-owned prison does for a parallel skit on, well, racism and profit.

'Cough.'

The trouble with Vonnegut's devices (that was another: his hero acquires TB) is that they make it easy for him to subordinate narrative to theme. The snippets form a thread on which he strings pearls of faux-naif wisdom. Thus: 'The prime two movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.' Or, '"Life's a bad dream", he said. "Do you know that?'" Or, 'All nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo'.

'Deep.'

You can do anything with a character in this form, load any amount of historical tonnage on him. Vonnegut has done it before. Hartke brings to mind Eliot Rosewater, Walter F. Starbuck, Billy Pilgrim and the rest. The author is, as usual, worried about war, money, history, psychological imbalance and chaos.

It is all done with voice. Vonnegut is a master of the first-person, manic-depressive stand-up. His statements may be hackneyed but they are, usually, funny. That is true even when the irony is leaden and the plot becomes absurdly self-referential, like a ball of string needing only one tug to pull it apart.

The best joke sits among the publishing details, beneath the copyright notice: 'Kurt Vonnegut has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work.'

'Hoc est corpus.'