And So It Went

By John Skow

HOCUS POCUS by Kurt Vonnegut; Putnam; 302 pages; $21.95

The knock against Kurt Vonnegut, back a couple of decades ago when he was a cult author, was that he pandered too glibly to the natural cynicism of the disaffected young. He was too quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired machine is not dying, but blackened and dead.

The form of the new novel is the author's standby, the diary of a bemused old man who has survived civilization's downfall. Perhaps because of this resemblance to his other books, or simply because the freight of anger and disgust is so heavy it upsets the novel's balance, the element of Hocus Pocus that is storytelling seems perfunctory. Eugene Debs Hartke is the diarist, a gung-ho U.S. Army officer during the Vietnam War; then a professor of science at Tarkington, a college for dyslectics in New York State; then briefly the warden of a prison for blacks into which the college is transformed; and finally, in the year 2001, the scapegoat defendant after a prison breakout.

Hartke describes fuel and food shortages, and a state of permanent riot amounting to a national decline so profound that even the Japanese in their business suits -- the "army of occupation" -- are walking away from properties in the U.S. and going home. "The National Forest," he complains, "is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before- yesterday's interest on the National Debt." In this dark mood, Hartke admires a science fiction story in which the revered Kilgore Trout (we assume, though the finest of pulp writers for some reason is not identified), in a journal called Black Garterbelt, explains the meaning of life. Germs, it seems, are being toughened by higher beings for the rigors of space travel; and human society -- Mozart, mutant turtles and all -- has amounted to nothing more than a convenient Petri plate.

Fair enough, but Hartke is not a vivid enough central figure so that his dismay illuminates the wreckage. Too much about him seems random, taken without calculation from the parts bin. Why, for instance, has the author named him after Eugene V. Debs, the great U.S. socialist? Merely, or so it appears, because Vonnegut likes the contrast of Debs' nobility ("While there is a lower class I am in it . . . while there is a soul in prison I am not free") with the grubby hopelessness of Hartke's world. And what about that college for dyslectics? Is dyslexia a sign of national decay? Has the author turned symbol monger? If not, what's the point?

The body of Kurt Vonnegut's writing contains some of the most uncomfortably funny social satire in English. What is offered here is something else, a try at prophecy in the darkest and gloomiest biblical sense. As prophecy it is major or minor, right or wrong, the reader's choice. As literature it is minor Vonnegut.