SOURCE: A review of Hocus Pocus, in West Coast Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 6, 1990, p. 24.

In the following review, Lubold argues that the key to Hocus Pocus is the way in which Vonnegut takes the concerns of today and portrays them in the extreme in his futuristic setting.

Vonnegut's new novel is about a man who has returned from Vietnam, and is now, in 2001, recalling events when he worked at a school in Upstate New York and later staged a prison break in a nearby prison. Now he awaits trial for this crime. But Hocus Pocus delivers a lot more; in fact, any plot is secondary to the author's presentation of the confusing and bizarre reality of the 21st century.

Vonnegut fuses his version of a futuristic reality with one which is familiar to the one we now face in the 1990s, with the Japanese buying up everything...