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“Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Innocent White Man in America”

Finally we get to the source of the collection's title! Leonard starts off by suggesting that, “Hocus Pocus seems to be Vonnegut’s best novel in years, funny and prophetic, yes, and fabulous too…”

But, he’s bothered by the practice of readers and reviewers filtering books through the lens of the author’s previous works and poses the question, “…you wonder what it is the reader really wants from a writer who’s been around so nobly, so long.” This applies to Vonnegut in particular because of the experiments in structure, style and plot devices in Vonnegut’s novels. Vonnegut, unlike a genre novelist, is trying different ways to break through to the reader…trying help us think about life and “invent the meaning of ‘all this’ for ourselves.” Leonard points out that perhaps Vonnegut is partly to blame for committing the sin of writing a classic for a first novel. Readers who were expecting Slaughter House Five the Sequel were probably disappointed when the met up with Gilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions (still one of the best character names in all of American Literature).

Leonard has a very interesting run through Vonnegut’s body of work…one line summarizing each (for example “God Bless You Mrs. Rosewater wanted to know ‘how to love people that have no use.’ ” He goes into much more depth about the key novels to build out his thesis but sums up Vonnegut’s philosophy best writing about Slapstick, "even if we aren’t ‘really good at life,’ we must never the less, like Laurel and Hardy, ‘bargain in good faith.’ ”

New term: chrono-synclastic infundibulum = from Sirens of Titan, a point in space where, upon entering, a person exists in multiple points and lines in space-time. Huh?

New learning: The protagonist of Hocus Pocus, Eugene debs Hartke, gets into West Point after cheating at a science fair.