Preview of Hocus Pocus Summary:

Once again Vonnegut tells his readers that everything is going to pieces and nothing can be done about it. As an example of the futility of people's efforts to stop at least some of the trouble, the main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, teaches at Tarkington, a college at the end of one of the Finger Lakes in Western New York. The college and its location are another of Vonnegut's private jokes; Vonnegut's alma mater is Cornell, also located in the Finger Lake district. Tarkington is a college for dyslexics, but the main activity there is sexual adventuring and spying on one another. The college has a museum of perpetual motion machines, all failures of course, another of Vonnegut's bitter comments on humankind's inabilities to keep pace with its dreams.

Racism appears in the story when Hartke is sent to a prison primarily populated by blacks and operated by...