Where I Really Didn't Like It

Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Do not like.

I should stop there.

I prefer to be positive and rarely finish a book I dislike this much, but I had reasons to persevere. Besides, I held out hope. It was a forlorn hope.

(2 stars rather than 1 in recognition of the author's creativity, however much I disliked its application. And everything was spelled right, so...)

What shocks me is how many people profess to love this book. Joseph Heller. John Irving. Lotsa reviewers. They're welcome to their opinion, of course, and I make allowances for taste, but I simply cannot see how we could be so far apart. It was so f'ing tedious to read this a little each day that it felt like a punishment. I get worked up just thinking about it.

The author's go-to bit was to give unnecessary, extraneous, goofy background details about every character, no matter how minor, no matter how distracting or disruptive to the "narrative." ("I have known several Donners. One was a year behind me at the Academy. Two were unrelated Tarkingtonians. One was a First Sergeant in Vietnam who had his arm blown off my a little boy with a homemade handgrenade." Almost completely irrelevant background information about barely-there characters. Chosen at random. From a random page.) The author loves bizarre and mundane equally and filled the pages with it until I was bursting with irrelevant information. Things happen in the story, especially sad, depressing, violent things, but in such a disjointed way (telling things out of order--really really out of order--is his other go-to bit) that it all feels like an introduction that won't end, preparing the reader for the actual story that will eventually begin.

I can't help but belabor it a little. A typical plot has characters moving through time and space from some starting point to some ending point--meandering about, maybe, with plenty of curves and false starts--but they at least make some kind of recognizable progress that we would call a plot. A representation of their path probably would look something like the board for the Candy Land game--there are a few things happening to the side along the way, sure, but there's a path, however twisty, that maps onto the MC confronting their main conflict. Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus is not like that, not even a little. (Maybe the last 20 pages. Maybe.) If you tried to represent the plot pictorially, instead of a path, it would look like a child's collage made of trash, feathers, buttons, pieces of lint, and bits of text and images cut from magazines, all spattered with paint or mustard or motor oil.

It's almost all noise and no signal, and it feels like a prank when I read that other people thought this was fun. And good. And praiseworthy. How? Why?

I don't wanna know. I'm done now. (Brushes hands.)

Anyway. Do. Not. Like.

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