"Hocus Pocus", Kurt Vonnegut: Nabbed from the Cuz

This is the first Vonnegut I read after reaching a maturity level appropriate to appreciate what he's doing. This copy I guess I stole, but mostly by accident. It was living at the house of the missus' cousin, where we stayed in Upstate New York when we moved Back East. I picked it up and started reading it, and must have gotten it mixed up with my own stuff, and it's been with me ever since. Down to Brooklyn, over to Austin, on to Long Beach...

It's a wacky one, for sure. The main character is a Vietnam vet who came back to work at a prison as a guard, and then is made a prisoner himself when the prisoners riot. Because he's not a violent prick guard, he's not treated too badly by the prisoners when they're in charge.

I may have made that entire synopsis up, and since the book is too far for me to get, I'm going to leave that as is. The veteran, as Vonnegut's politics would have suggested, had always felt conflicted about what he'd done or seen, and the position of prison guard was almost too ironic for him. I'm starting to think he was a prisoner there himself to start with...

I can't remember. I read it more than six years ago, and have had a few beers and Pynchon's in the time between.

In any case, one of the two more striking elements is that it's sections range in size from pages to lines. The premise being that he's been writing it on scraps of paper, and the sense you get reading it is a oddly paced confessional. The second element is part of the puzzle, and how the narrator frames it. Of his regrets, he realizes that the number of women he's slept with is the same number of people he killed in combat. This tidbit he mentions early on, but never states what the number is. Throughout the entire book. One of the very last things he says is an explanation, a rubric, for how to calculate the number, what pages to look on for the pieces to combine to get the answer.

I guess these little things are more review-like than I felt earlier.

Oh well. It was good. I liked it at the time. I'm sure it's not Vonnegut's best work, but it had an interesting pace and story design, and I would recommend it.