[In the excerpt below, Phillips criticizes Vonnegut's style in Hocus Pocus.]

In closing [Hocus Pocus], I was reminded of John Jay Chapman's remark: "When I put down a book by Stevenson, I swear I am hungry for something to read." Kurt Vonnegut's book left me hungry indeed; it is almost totally devoid of some standard ingredients of fiction—dialogue, form, confrontation, coherent plot. The author relies almost totally on the narrator and his one point of view. And the narration comes to us tricked-up with "unconventional lines separating passages within chapters" which "indicate where one scrap ended and the next began. The shorter the passage, the shorter the scrap" ("Editor's Note"). The narrator did not have access to uniform writing paper, see? The writer, locked up in a library and facing trial, was desperate to express himself. His name, Eugene Debs Hartke, is clue to Vonnegut's social concerns within the novel. Anyone who owns an aging VW Beetle is fine. The narrator manages to disparage rich kids, Japanese entrepreneurs and all prosperous foreigners, optimists, and people who are mentally ill. At one point the narrator's wife and mother-in-law are both carted off to an asylum, much to his relief. The narrator's definition of high art is, "Making the most of the raw materials of futility."

The snippet-technique soon begins to wear. One card or shard reads, in its entirety, "Vietnam." Another states grandly, "There is so much we have to learn about TV!" And because the narrator has developed TB, many cards are devoted to his cough: "Cough, cough. Silence. Two more; Cough, cough. There. I'm ok now. Cough. That's it. I really am OK now. Peace." One wonders what the author would have put on the paper had the narrator suffered from, say, postnasal drip?

The author's, or the narrator's, international vision embraces such statements as, "All nations bigger than Denmark are crocks of doo-doo." Such euphemisms fill the book with cuteness. Repeatedly he refers to when "the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Vietnam." Either Vonnegut wants to make sure he makes his point, or he is unaware of his repetitiousness; how many times need we be told that the Chemistry Department of Harvard University developed napalm?

One has to admit Vonnegut is capable of provoking a smile, as when he describes some natives as being "just as white as Nancy Reagan." But the slap-dash quality of Hocus Pocus is disconcerting. For instance, "After Lyle Hooper was executed, with a bullet behind the ear, I visited the Trustees in the stable. Tex Johnson was still spiked to the cross-timbers in the loft overhead, and they knew it. But before I tell about that, I had better finish my story of how I got a job in Athena."

Vonnegut's penchant for reiterating a phrase ("And so it goes," was the litany in Slaughterhouse-Five) is here reduced to "What a planet!" His inventive powers seem to be wearing thin. It is difficult to disagree with his fine ecological feelings in Hocus Pocus. On the other hand, it was André Gide who observed, "Fine feelings are the stuff that bad literature is made of."