BOOKS

Any old irony

James Buchan

HOCUS POCUS by Kurt Vonnegut Cape, L13.99, pp.303 This is Kurt Vonnegut's 17th novel to appear in England, so the British reader should know what to expect. It's all here in Hocus Pocus, vintage Vonnegut: the short narrative units, the repetitions as in a roundelay, the intergalactic knowingness and the small-town good sense, the good humour, the tricks of typography, the exclamation marks as in a debutante's letter, the diversions, the threadbare coincidences.

Let me say right off that I can't begin with this stuff. Even when I was a hippy, I couldn't stand Vonnegut. Vonnegut, along with a Californian novelist of cloying whimsy called Richard Brautigan, were the only novelists read in my circle of friends. I rebelled against this orthodoxy — I thought rebellion against orthodoxy was the point about being a hippy. I also thought Vonnegut's relativism was dead fishy. There is a passage in Slaughterhouse 5 that greatly impressed my friends: All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

This statement, I now see, is nonsense.

Kurt Vonnegut began his writing career in science fiction. Early books such as Player Piano and Cat's Cradle caught the spirit of the 1950s and early 1960s, when a lot of things seemed possible that don't seem possible now. In Slaughterhouse 5, Vonnegut's masterpiece, he feels suffi- ciently at home in the genre to use it to creep up on and describe what is obviously his capital experience: his capture by the Germans in the Ardennes, his deportation to Dresden and the fire-bombing of the city. The approach is circuitous. Vonne- gut's main character, an optometrist called Billy Pilgrim bursts into tears long after the war when he hears, at a party for his 18th wedding anniversary, a barbershop quar- tet. He lies down and is transported back in time to Dresden in February 1945:

The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The guards drew together instinctively, roll- ed their eyes. They experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open. Thcy looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet. 'So long, forever,' they might have been singing, 'old fellows and pals; so long forever, old sweethearts and pals — God bless 'em —'

I know no passage in a later book that delivers authentic emotion in such a strange shape. In the later books, Vonnegut has pieces

of science fiction lying about — I suppose to remind the world of his humble literary origins, rather as a Mafia don might display a cobbler's last in his office. Vonnegut's most tiresome character, a science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout, keeps turning up. Trout's stories can be found only in old-fashioned soft-core magazines, though his maker — in Breakfast of Champions (1973) — promises him an implausible posthumous fame. In Hocus Pocus, Trout surfaces anonymously and gratuitously when the lead character comes gn an old copy of Black Garterbelt in his wartime bootlocker. He sits down and reads a science-fiction story about the planet Tral- famadore (an old friend from Slaughter- 'These mills look a bit too satanic for my liking.' house 5). But in truth, science fiction for Vonnegut is now nothing more than a mechanical literary device to give distance and irony. He also uses commercial and bureaucratic language, capital letters in odd places, drawings, TV and barrack- room medical terminology for the same general purpose.

Hocus Pocus is set in the future, or rather in a parody of the mid-1980s US. The 82nd Airborne is fighting the Drug War in the South Bronx; great American corporations have been sold to Koreans and Omanis; in small-town bars, the good ol' boys say, 'Give me a Wop', when they want a Budweiser because Anheuser- Busch is Italian-owned. All the rich and powerful in the story are in fact paupers, because they have put their money in a company called Microsecond Arbitrage which is going belly-up. With Vonnegut, one could always detect liberal anger be- hind the so-it-goes smile, but here for once he comes right out with it:

There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and supersti- tion and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?

The story takes place in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. It concerns Eugene Debs Hardtke, a good soldier in Vietnam, now a good professor of music appreciation and, I think, literature at a minor college for the dim children of rich parents. Across the lake from Tarkington College is the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution: the precise bureaucratic euphemism pre- pares the reader, even at this early stage, for some pretty heavy irony. You just know that Vonnegut is setting you up for the congruences between the two institu- tions, not their differences, and this is what happens. Hardtke is fired from Tarkington for being unpatriotic and promiscuous; he moves across to teach at Athena; there is a mass jail break; the prisoners escape across the ice and lay waste Tarkington; they are subdued and Hardtke is appointed warden of a new prison at Tarkington; and then he is imprisoned there.

In a realistic novel, these leaden echoes across the lake might not be so obtrusive. But Vonnegut despises the realistic novel. He has no time for novelistic free choice: his characters act as they do because of bad chemicals in the bloodstream, because their families are 'booby-trapped' with dyslexia or madness, or because they're programmed by Tralfamadorians or some-

such. The prison has been contracted out to a Japanese corporation and the warden is a survivor of Hiroshima:

Warden Matsumoto was an odd duck. Many of his quirks were no doubt a consequence of his having had an atomic bomb dropped on him from childhood.

Vonnegut's characters are types of this cartoon quality: they have only one charac- teristic or attribute. There is Ernest Hub- ble Hiscock, who flew into a Japanese carrier at Midway; Damon Stern, who rides a unicycle; Tex Johnson, who gets crucified in the college belfry; Mary Alice French, who won first prize at the Ohio Science Fair. These characters, about 40 of them, parade quickly across the stage or rather tap into one another like billiard balls. That's all there is by way of narrative link, except some fraudulent coincidence and a bit of repetition. There is one repeated phrase — 'buried next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun went down' — which had me chewing the carpet by the end. On the way, there are good passages. It may be his experience of war, but Vonne- gut has an eye for extreme dislocation. There is a scene where Hardtke, fishing on the lake with his mad mother-in-law, sees a prison truck break down and there, step- ping out of it, for the first time, prisoners, black men. At that moment, his mother-in- law catches a pike. Later, a Malcolm Forbes character arrives at Tarkington to collect a degree with a retinue and a blown-up replica of his Irish castle, which then sails away over the prison. Vonnegut also understands better than anybody the role of TV in the US and how some Americans have difficulty remembering which is reality and which is commentary on it.

When I came back out, the TV set was displaying a program I had watched when I was a boy, Howdy Doody. I told Donner the Warden wanted to see him, but he didn't seem to know who I was. I felt as though I were trying to wake up a mean drunk. I thought I might have to fight Donner before he realised that Howdy Doody wasn't the main thing going on.

But in Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut is hand- ling themes — war, return from war, madness — that he did well in Slaughter- house 5. The parade of Tom-and-Jerry characters adds nothing to our knowledge. The book ends with Hardtke enumerating both the people he killed in Vietnam and the women he has slept with. Guess what, it's the same number and there's a riddle and a drawing to show it! So it goes.