Hocus Pocus (book)

Hocus Pocus

First edition hardcover
Author	Kurt Vonnegut
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Putnam Publishing Group
Publication date	1990
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback) and eBook
Pages	302 pp
ISBN

Hocus Pocus, or What's the Hurry, Son? is a 1990 novel by Kurt Vonnegut.

Like many of Vonnegut's novels, Hocus Pocus uses a non-linear narrative and has a plot centered on a major event heavily alluded to until the final chapters.

The main character is Eugene Debs Hartke, a Vietnam War veteran, college professor, and carillonneur who realizes that he has killed exactly as many people as the number of women he has had sex with. The character's name is a homage to American labor and political leader Eugene V. Debs and anti-war senator Vance Hartke, both from Vonnegut's home state, Indiana.

The main character's name-sharing with Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist Party of America candidate for President of the United States (one of his candidacies occurred while he was in prison), is explicitly discussed in the book. The following quote from Eugene V. Debs appears several times: "...while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

In an editor's note at the beginning of the book, Vonnegut claims to have found hundreds of scraps of paper of varying sizes, from wrapping paper to business cards, sequentially numbered by their author (Hartke) in order to form a narrative of some kind. The breaks between pieces of paper often signal a sort of ironic "punchline". This theme of an episodic narrative and scraps of information is echoed in one recurring feature of the novel, a computer program called GRIOT. By entering the details of a person's life, the user can be given an approximation of what sort of life that person might have had based on the database of lives the program can access. The main pieces of information required for GRIOT to work are: age, race, degree of education, and drug use.

Hartke mentions early on that he is suffering from tuberculosis at the time of his writings, and writes the word "cough" in the text every now and again as well as other descriptors to represent times when he coughed aloud while writing.

Another unusual element of style Vonnegut uses in Hocus Pocus is to consistently use numerals rather than words to represent numbers (e.g. "1" instead of "one" or "1,000,000" instead of "one million"). He explains this in an Editor's Note at the beginning of the book saying "...that numbers lost much of their potency when diluted by an alphabet".