SOURCE: A review of Hocus Pocus, in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 135-36.

In the excerpt below, Phillips criticizes Vonnegut's style in Hocus Pocus.

In closing [Hocus Pocus], I was reminded of John Jay Chapman's remark: "When I put down a book by Stevenson, I swear I am hungry for something to read." Kurt Vonnegut's book left me hungry indeed; it is almost totally devoid of some standard ingredients of fiction—dialogue, form, confrontation, coherent plot. The author relies almost totally on the narrator and his one point of view. And the narration comes to us tricked-up with "unconventional lines separating passages within chapters" which "indicate where one scrap ended and the next began. The shorter the passage, the shorter the scrap" ("Editor's Note"). The narrator did not have access to uniform writing paper, see? The writer, locked up in a library and facing trial...