SOURCE: "Black Magic," in Nation, Vol. 251, No. 12, October 15, 1990, pp. 421-25.

In the review below, Leonard praises Hocus Pocus and discusses Vonnegut's fatalistic message.

Hocus Pocus seems to me to be Vonnegut's best novel in years—funny and prophetic, yes, and fabulous too, as cunning as Aesop and as gloomy as Grimm; but also rich and referential; a meditation on American history and American literature; an elegy; a keening. "How is this for a definition of high art," we are asked by the antihero, Eugene Debs Hartke: "'Making the most of the raw materials of futility?'"

But Hocus Pocus has been not so much reviewed as consumer-tested, like a bar of chocolate, as if all Vonneguts were Hershey's, needing only to be categorized as Semi-Sweet, Special Dark or Bitter Almond. Without even bothering to cut a new stencil, critics perceive him as an amusing atavism of the 1960s...