SOURCE: "And So It Went," in Time, Vol. 136, No. 10, September 3, 1990, p. 73.

In the following review, Skow praises Vonnegut's message in Hocus Pocus, but criticizes his writing.

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...