[McInerney is an American novelist. In the following review, he discusses the balance between pessimism and humor in Vonnegut's novels, focusing on Hocus Pocus.]

For purposes of comparison with our own stodgy, inherited universe, contemporary philosophers sometimes conjure up the concept of possible worlds. They've got nothing on Kurt Vonnegut, who in 12 previous novels has frequently resorted to other planets for slyly comparative purposes. But unlike most contemporary philosophers—who fastidiously restrict themselves to questions of linguistic and logical analysis—or most contemporary novelists, for that matter, Mr. Vonnegut is still asking the big, embarrassing, childish teleological questions. He is probably our leading literary big-question asker. He keeps posing the kind of questions, as he himself once put it, that college sophomores ask. Like, why are we on the planet? Or, why is there war? And, is technology inherently lethal? Unlike most sophomores, he has the imagination to illuminate these questions.

Although it is set in the near future, Hocus Pocus is the most topical, realistic Vonnegut novel to date, and shows the struggle of an artist a little impatient with allegory and more than a little impatient with his own country. Nationality has previously been a spurious category—a granfalloon—in the Vonnegut world view. The possible world portrayed here verges shamelessly on the actual.

Like many of Mr. Vonnegut's novels, Hocus Pocus is a retrospective first-person narrative in which several time and story lines gradually converge. It is told by one Eugene Debs Hartke and purportedly written in prison on scraps of paper, each scrap a thought, story or digression unto itself—a form ideally suited to Mr. Vonnegut's thumbnail essayistic bent and his high-speed forward- and reverse-narrative time travel.

Hartke is a graduate of West Point and a veteran of the Vietnam War, a thoughtful but not tormented man who killed many human beings on the orders of his Government and dispensed many official lies as an information officer. After leaving Vietnam and the Army he becomes a teacher at Tarkington College in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, a gentle institution that specializes in nurturing the dyslexic and moronic sons and daughters of the ruling class.

After years of pleasant academic rustication, Hartke is fired from the college at the behest of a rightwing television demagogue who feels that Hartke is too pessimistic. Pessimism, as everyone knows and as the board of trustees reminds him, is un-American and probably even anti-American. A physics teacher, Hartke has made the mistake, among others, of informing his students that the idea of perpetual motion is a pipe dream. Unpatriotically, he explains, "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."

When he is dismissed, ostensibly for sexual misconduct, Hartke finds employment just across the lake at the former state prison, run by a Japanese corporation that operates it much more efficiently and profitably than the state did. "Color-coded" prisons have become a growth industry, in part because most productive domestic industry has disappeared. "Poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors." The prison where Hartke works, near the college town of Scipio, is populated entirely by black inmates, the Supreme Court having decided that it was cruel and inhuman to confine one race with another. America has been largely resegregated—black insulated from white, rich from poor.

Hartke manages to teach some inmates how to read, though the immediate reported benefits of literacy are mainly an increased pleasure in masturbation and wider circulation for the anti-Semitic tract "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." "The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment."

When gang members launch a military operation to break out a drug dealer, the entire prison population escapes and crosses the frozen lake to the Tarkington campus. For a variety of reasons, not least the racist supposition that blacks could not possibly have planned the escape, Hartke is eventually arrested as the leader of the uprising and incarcerated himself. Prison may not be such a bad place to be in the year 2001. Most of the United States has been sold to foreigners, and what is left is broken down and depleted. Black markets, race war, martial law, tuberculosis and AIDS are all somewhere between endemic and epidemic.

Like Eugene Debs Hartke, Mr. Vonnegut has always been a pessimist—"a pillar of salt," as he describes himself in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Like Lot's wife, he looks back at the carnage. In this case, he also looks forward, somewhat in the manner of another biblical personage, Jeremiah.

The bitter ironies in his books have always been tempered by a whimsical stoicism, despair averted by glimpses of individual compassion and the mild palliative of "harmless untruths" like the pleasantly ditsy religion of Bokononism in Cat's Cradle. He is a satirist with a heart, a moralist with a whoopee cushion, a cynic who wants to believe. His fiercest social criticism is usually disguised in parable. In Cat's Cradle, for instance, a substance called Ice Nine, which on release freezes all the water on the face of the earth, stands in for nuclear weapons. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians provide a cosmic perspective on the inexplicable suffering and horror of the firebombing of Dresden. In Jailbird, the terrestrial rape of the environment is echoed in the story of the planet Vicuna, where scientists found a way to convert time into food and energy, thereby running out of it.

As if racing against such a clock, Mr. Vonnegut is working much closer to the ground in Hocus Pocus, which has more in common with Anthony Trollope's book The Way We Live Now than with Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. It is the most richly detailed and textured of Mr. Vonnegut's renderings of this particular planet. Unlike many of his major characters, Hartke seems like a real person, and Scipio seems like a real town. Some readers may miss the wilder leaps of imagination and the whimsy, but what is gained is a muscular dignity of voice that only rarely is tendentious. And, like outer space in The Sirens of Titan, Hocus Pocus is not without "empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death."

If he eschews parables, Mr. Vonnegut still finds abundant metaphors for our current situation. Hartke compares the land of the free and the home of the brave to a vast plantation, the soil and labor of which has been exhausted. The owners, whites of European descent, are selling it off, dispossessing the laborers. The buyers, mainly Japanese, find themselves as an army of occupation in a hostile, primitive land, bogged down in a terrible quagmire that may prove as destructive to their nation as Vietnam was to ours. Prisons spring up like the antibodies that attempt to form hard protective shells around the germs of tuberculosis, which is enjoying a comeback.

But don't worry. There is sort of a bright side to all of this. The science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout briefly appears—along with others in Mr. Vonnegut's repertory company, represented by a story called "Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamador," in which he speculates that the whole point of human history is to breed strains of germs powerful enough to travel through space and spread DNA throughout the universe. Once we are through trashing and poisoning the planet any germ hardy enough to survive here could presumably make it anywhere.