Hocus Pocus

Eugene Debs Hartke is writing his memoirs on scraps of paper — matchbook covers, prescription labels, the backs of business cards — in a prison cell. He has been accused of helping convicts escape from the prison where, until recently, he was a warden. Before that, he taught physics at a college for the learning-disabled. Before that, he fought in Vietnam. This is the story of a man who tried to be good in a country that made goodness very difficult.

Hocus Pocus is one of Vonnegut’s most searing political novels — a portrait of a near-future America that has sold its universities and prisons to foreign corporations, imprisoned an extraordinary proportion of its population, and lost whatever it once pretended to believe. The satire is angry and specific, but it is delivered with Vonnegut’s characteristic warmth and compassion for the ordinary human beings trapped inside the systems he is dissecting.

Written in 1990, it reads today with the uncomfortable precision of prophecy. Late Vonnegut at his best: morally serious, formally inventive, and impossible to dismiss. Published by Vintage.