SOURCE: "Black Magic," in Nation, Vol. 251, No. 12, October 15, 1990, pp. 421-25.

[In the review below, Leonard praises Hocus Pocus and discusses Vonnegut's fatalistic message.]

Hocus Pocus seems to me to be Vonnegut's best novel in years—funny and prophetic, yes, and fabulous too, as cunning as Aesop and as gloomy as Grimm; but also rich and referential; a meditation on American history and American literature; an elegy; a keening. "How is this for a definition of high art," we are asked by the antihero, Eugene Debs Hartke: "'Making the most of the raw materials of futility?'"

But Hocus Pocus has been not so much reviewed as consumer-tested, like a bar of chocolate, as if all Vonneguts were Hershey's, needing only to be categorized as Semi-Sweet, Special Dark or Bitter Almond. Without even bothering to cut a new stencil, critics perceive him as an amusing atavism of the 1960s. Or a celebrity-guru who has reached the bottom of his cracker barrel. Or a Pet Rock. Or an old fart. It makes you wonder why a writer ever tries to do something different. It also makes you wonder what it is a reader really wants from a writer who's been around so nobly, so long.

We take our leave of a Vonnegut novel, even Hocus Pocus, feeling … what? Certainly not comforted, nor galvanized, nor whammied. More … reflective, as if emerging from the vectors of a haiku. I spent one Christmas with him, years ago, in New Hampshire. We happened, in an orchard, upon stricken boughs of black apples. Helicopters had sprayed Stop-Drop on these apples during the October picking season, and then an early frost had killed them off, and so they hung there, very Japanese. Vonnegut said, "If you don't write about those apples, I will." He never did. Maybe they were too conveniently symbolic. (Stop-Drop, after all, is a kind of Ice-9.) But that's not how a novel of his feels, either.

Another time, I think in Maine, Vonnegut got down and dirty with Ray Mungo, who explained that his communards were leaving for the wilds of Canada because they "wanted to be the last people living on the earth." Vonnegut wondered, "Isn't that a sort of stuck-up thing to want to be?" And, of course, stuck-up writers are a dime a dozen: the wart hog postmodernist, the history-devouring sage, Umberto Eco. We never feel, after reading Vonnegut, that he thinks he's any better than we are. (We probably should, but we don't.) We feel that a sad man, inside his funny jokes, despairs of our ever getting his plain-spoken point, and we're grateful that he goes on anyway, trying all over again to make us braver and wiser, but the mind clouds as the lips grin, and we go about our chastened business with a blank uneasiness. He's such a fatalist.

Let me try again: At the end of the American Playhouse public-television production of Terrence McNally's short play Andre's Mother, the mother (Sada Thompson) and the lover (Richard Thomas) go to Central Park to mourn Andre's death from AIDS. Unable to speak their grief, they send up little white balloons. It is a kind of naming. That's what a Vonnegut feels like, only his balloons are black, like those apples.

We began taking him for granted after his megabucks Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Part of it was his own fault. His next time out, in Breakfast of Champions, he detached himself from his creations, cut the strings as if they were marionettes or kites. He was 50 years old: "Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoi freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career." Readers hate this, which is why Conan Doyle had to bring back Sherlock Holmes, and why Nicolas Freeling is resented for having lost interest in Van der Valk, for having invented Castang instead. Besides, with Breakfast, weird personal stuff started creeping into Vonnegut's fiction—like his dead father. He dropped the "junior."

But by that time, we felt we'd gotten the message, and it wasn't "Greetings!" The Sirens of Titan asked us how to cause "less rather than more pain," how to "love whoever is around to be loved." Mother Night warned that "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Bokonon told us in Cat's Cradle to "pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on." God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater wanted to know how to love "people who have no use." Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five overheard Eliot Rosewater telling his psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living."

Art, of course, is a wonderful lie. After catastrophes and revolutions, Hiroshima and "the Nazi monkey business," God was telling us through Vonnegut that we'd have to invent the meaning of "all this" for ourselves, dream it up. This is why his characters left town so often, left Mother Earth herself, for outer space, Tralfamadore. On Tralfamadore, novels have "no beginning, no middle, no end, no moral, no causes, no effects"; they're just clumps of symbols. Vonnegut seems to need Tralfamadorians the way Garcia Márquez needs angels and Toni Morrison needs ghosts and Shakespeare needed clowns. Just maybe, by the transcendent power of the imagination, we could reverse the charges, call back the bombers over Dresden:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen…. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes…. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

Then again, maybe not. Breakfast of Champions was gloomier. Imagination was not enough. In Breakfast, for instance, the sci-fi novelist Kilgore Trout imagined "a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to realizing that they were making champagne."

Bummer! So much for the chronosynclastic infundibulum. But Vonnegut went on dreaming after Breakfast, with or without his critics. ("Yes," he said in Slapstick, "and while my big brother meditated about clouds, the mind I was given daydreamed the story in this book. It is about desolated cities and spiritual cannibalism and incest and loneliness and lovelessness and death.") It's just that he dreamed his way into different sorts of heads, heads attached to symbolic citizens—writers, soldiers, artists, politicians—whose moral autonomy wasn't what it ought to be. The weather inside these heads rained confusion; history came down hard and hurt; we were killing the planet. The transforming powers of the romantic self needed some group help, some civic assistance, a home front.

Slapstick is a fairy tale, set in the future instead of the past. There are monsters who mean well, a witch, a Tom Thumb (he's Chinese), a noble steed named Budweiser ("golden feathers hid her hooves"), a perilous journey with a gift (a Dresden candlestick stolen from the tent of a sleeping chieftain), an Island of Death (where "people lit their homes at night with burning rags stuck in bowls of animal fat") and a ceremony (the 100th birthday party for the last American President, who is writing his memoirs, which is the book we are reading). There are three ideas many another postmodernist would kill for: a gravity that's as variable as the weather, a Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped, and a blueprint for abolishing loneliness in the following way: A computer will establish 10,000 brand-new "extended families," giving "proportional representation to all sorts of Americans, according to their numbers," by randomly assigning everybody in the country a new middle name which consists of "a noun, the name of a flower or a fruit or a fish or a mollusk, or a gem or a mineral or a chemical element—connected by a hyphen to a number between one and twenty." Thus each individual instantly acquires 190,000 cousins (same middle name) and 10,000 brothers and sisters (same middle name and number). Daffodils, Orioles, Berylliums, Chipmunks, Bauxites, Strawberries and Pachysandras form clubs and even "parliaments" to take care of one another.

One more misbegotten "granfalloon," like the Communist Party.

And yet: Slapstick also proposes that, even if we aren't "really very good at life," we must nevertheless, like Laurel and Hardy, "bargain in good faith" with our destinies. And there are instruction manuals for this bargaining: Robert's Rules of Order, the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Bill of Rights.

None of these books was written by a Tralfamadorian.

Jailbird's about Harvard and Nixon; Sacco and Vanzetti; Hiss and Chambers; trade unionism, corporate greed, the Holocaust and Watergate—not to mention Roy Cohn. There are catacombs under Grand Central, and harps on top of the Chrysler Building, and even Nixon's "unhappy little smile" looks to Starbuck "like a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer." Some fairy tale! "Strong stuff," says Starbuck, whose girlfriend tells him: "You couldn't help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed—so you were a good man just the same." And she reads Starbuck's books the way we ought to read Vonnegut's: "the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave, old enemies. Their magic would become hers."

To the three how-to manuals mentioned in Slapstick, Jailbird adds a couple more: Lincoln's "with malice toward none" Second Inaugural—Vonnegut may look like Mark Twain, but he feels as bad as Honest Abe; "Strange mingling of mirth and tears, of the tragic and grotesque, of cap and crown, of Socrates and Rabelais, of Aesop and Marcus Aurelius," said Robert Ingersoll of Lincoln—and most radical of all, Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Kilgore Trout, one of the few Vonnegut characters besides Wanda June to survive the defenestration of Breakfast, is in jail for treason because he has preached the Sermon on the Mount.

Galapagos is about evolution, Deadeye Dick is about the neutron bomb, and Bluebeard about the Abstract Expressionism of Evil. Strong stuff!

Like Starbuck in Jailbird, Rabo Karabekian in Bluebeard tries "to believe what the people with hearts believed," so perhaps he's a good man "just the same"—a child of survivors of the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, which gives us one more genocide to grieve; a veteran, like all Vonnegut's antiheroes, of World War II, which he spent commanding a platoon of artists "so good at camoflage, that half the things we hid from the enemy have to this very day never been seen again"; a postwar intimate of Pollock and Rothko; a man once divorced, once widowed, twice a failed father. Although Rabo paints, he isn't very good at the modern art that renders "absolutely nothing but itself." Much of his own work's been destroyed "thanks to unforeseen chemical reactions between the sizing of my canvas and the acrylic wallpaint and colored tapes I had applied to them." He rusticates in misanthropic Hamptons exile with an empty pool and a locked potato barn, inside which we'll meet his last will and testament, his secret witness.

There are the usual dark chords. We are reminded of the industrial know-how a genocide needs "to kill that many big, resourceful animals cheaply and quickly, make sure that nobody gets away, and dispose of mountains of meat and bones afterwards." (On the college lecture circuit, Vonnegut speaks of "humanity itself [as] an unstoppable glacier made of hot meat, which ate up everything in sight and then made love, and then doubled in size again.") But there are also the usual grace notes—those lovely moments that seem to fall in Vonnegut's pages like autumn leaves. According to Rabo, for example, God Almighty Himself "must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train."

But what we've picked up, of importance, along the way in these late novels are more books of recipes—Shakespeare, Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, Picasso's Guernica, Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland. This is the library of how-to (and etiquette) instruction manuals—cookbooks and sacred civilizing texts; a nest of brains where we sit down to read the latest novel by the last innocent white man in America, a theoretician of Chaos before James Gleick explained it, a Green before they got together in political parties in places like Germany; a Johnny Appleseed of decencies; a Space-Age Buddha; Vonnegut at 68.

We should know he's up to something special in Hocus Pocus just from the name of his antihero, Eugene Debs Hartke. Eugene V. Debs, of course, was the American labor leader who said, "While there is a lower class I am in it. While there is a criminal element I am of it. While there is a soul in prison I am not free." Debs tried to keep us out of World War I but lost out to the more practical-minded Samuel Gompers. He will lose out again with Hartke, who wanted as a boy to go to the University of Michigan but who ends up instead, after cheating in a high school science fair, at West Point. From West Point he goes to Vietnam. ("If I were a fighter plane instead of a human being," he says, "there would be little pictures of people painted all over me.") From Vietnam, he goes to teach the dyslexic children of the Anglo-Saxon filthy rich at Tarkington College in upstate New York, where there's Samoza Hall and a Pahlavi Pavilion. From Tarkington, he goes to teach black and Hispanic illiterates at the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, "a brutal fortress of iron and masonry on a naked hilltop," directly across the valley from the college.

For different reasons, in the year 2001 learning-disabled children of the filthy rich and illiterate black and Hispanic dope dealers can't read the Writing on the Wall. Even if they could, according to Hartke, "Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe."

We are reading the story that Hartke has written down on stray scraps of brown wrapping paper and the backs of envelopes while awaiting trial, like Howard Campbell Jr. in Mother Night, like Kilgore Trout in Jailbird, for treason. There's been a failed revolution. The blacks and Hispanics escaped from Athena, crossed the frozen lake in the valley, ate the horses and the campus dogs and killed some white people in the "emerald-studded Oz or City of God or Camelot" of Tarkington. Before they all got murdered in their turn, they declared a sort of Paris Commune. Since it's assumed by the triumphant military government that blacks and Hispanics couldn't possibly have plotted this revolt on their own, Hartke must have done it for them. Besides waiting for his trial, he is also adding up the number of women he's gone to bed with and the number of men he's killed, and he's afraid he'll come to the exact same body count.

I'm not going to tell you about Hartke's crazy wife and mother-in-law, who make spiderwebs of toilet paper all over the house. Or just how our prisons came to be "color-coded." Or what we're supposed to think of GRIOT, the computer program of the sociobiologists. Or why Hartke thinks "the two principal currencies of the planet are the Yen and fellatio." And never mind what goes on at the Black Cat Café. But there are some things you need to know.

In the year 2001 the Japanese run our prisons and hospitals, though they were smart enough to pass on our inner-city schools. Koreans own The New York Times. Italians own the St. Louis Cardinals. Among the trustees of Tarkington College are a thinly disguised William F. Buckley Jr. and a thinly disguised Malcolm Forbes (who shows up with Elizabeth Taylor on a motorcycle). These trustees are told, though they refuse to believe it, that they've treated America as a "plantation," and now that "the soil is exhausted, and the natives are getting sicker and hungrier every day, begging for food and medicine and shelter," and the water mains are broken and the bridges are falling down, "You are taking all your money and getting out of here."

They are told this in the valley where once upon a time were built the covered wagons that went west—maybe even the prairie schooners for the fast-food Donner Party. There are also in this valley Indian ghosts, severed heads, a floating castle and twenty-seven perpetual-motion machines "with garnets and amethysts for bearings, with arms and legs of exotic woods, with tumbling balls of ivory, with chutes and counterweights of silver." As if to balance this "magic of precious metals"—as everything in Hocus Pocus is exquisitely balanced, from the dyslexics and the illiterates to the number of women loved and men murdered—there is a carillon of thirty-two bells made "from mingled Union and Confederate rifle barrels and cannonballs gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg." At Gettysburg, in fact, the man who started Tarkington College was shot by Confederate soldiers because he looked so much like Abraham Lincoln.

Mention is also made of Lee, Custer and Westmoreland.

A critic doesn't have to work very hard to figure out that, for Kurt Vonnegut, the Civil War between whites and blacks is far from over and the Civil War between rich and poor has only begun: That's what he's writing his novel about. Nor need you be a semiotician to notice that he does his dreaming about the Civil War inside the fevered head of American literature.

It's not just that the prisoners skating over the frozen lake are right out of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Nor that we meet James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser and a mortician with the name of "Norman Updike." Like Mailer and Arthur Miller, Hartke can't stop brooding about Marilyn Monroe. Edgar Allan Poe is quoted. We're actually introduced to Moby Dick (at least to his penis). I'm sure there are New England Transcendentalists hiding like angels in these hardwood trees. "Tarkington" probably refers as well to Booth—like Vonnegut, an Indiana novelist, although he went to Fitzgerald's Princeton instead of Vonnegut's (and Pynchon's) Cornell. Remember the Penrod stories and The Plutocrat? Like Cheever's Falconer, Hocus Pocus is a Sing Sing/Attica novel. Hartke's scraps of paper remind me of those "odds and ends of thoughts" that Dr. Reefy, in Winesburg, Ohio, scribbled down on bits of paper and then stuffed away in his pockets to become "little hard round balls." I wouldn't even be surprised if one reason Vonnegut left all the dirty words out of Hocus Pocus was that he felt as playful as Mark Twain felt when he left all the weather out of The American Claimant.

If I seem to be working too hard, it's because nobody else did—except Vonnegut. Like Walt Whitman (and Allen Ginsberg), when Vonnegut goes to the Civil War, he's a male nurse. Leaves of Grass is another of his sacred texts. American literature itself, the lens through which he looks at history, bloody history, is a comfort and a subversion. According to Hawthorne: "'Faith!' shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, 'Faith! Faith!' as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness." And Melville, on reading Hawthorne, stopped to shake his head: "For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance … this black conceit pervades him through and through."

Black conceits, black apples, black balloons. Strong stuff!