Cry Snooker — A Closer Reading

Domestic Friction as a Launchpad

The opening pages rely on rapid-fire dialogue and physical comedy. George’s complaints about perfume evaporation and the Bendix are met with Rosy’s deflections, each line revealing a power struggle over blame and competence. The power mower incident—left running in high gear through Charlie’s fence—is a microcosm of the story’s central conceit: well-intentioned actions that spiral into unintended destruction. Fetler uses these mundane arguments to foreshadow the larger-scale chaos to come, without ever leaving the couple’s living room.

The Pressure Cooker and Its Aftermath

Charlie’s anniversary gift, a pressure cooker, is the catalyst. Though the excerpt cuts before its use, the story’s title and later developments suggest it becomes a weapon of ‘senseless destruction.’ The narrative leaps from this domestic object to a society where such destruction is systematized: George becomes Special Adviser to the Mayor on Senseless Destruction, and ‘snookers’—presumably robotic or mechanical agents—buzz over rooftops. The pressure cooker thus bridges the personal and the political, turning a kitchen appliance into a symbol of economic policy.

The Rise of Vernher von Wissenschaft

Midway, the German inventor Vernher von Wissenschaft appears, cracking a Rommel whip and speaking in a thick accent (‘Chust come from the President’). He reveals that the snooker-based economy has become a global arms race: Russia and United Africa demand snookers or threaten atomic war. Vernher’s role as the ‘mad scientist’ figure—whose creations have no emotions, yet show ‘restlessness’—adds a Cold War layer to the satire. His suggestion of returning to ‘savage pre-civilization’ as the only way out underscores the story’s bleak humor.

E-Day and the Escape Plan

In the later excerpt, George tells Rosy ‘E-Day’ is here—‘E for Escape.’ The couple’s plan to flee the snooker-driven dystopia mirrors their earlier attempts to manage household chaos. George’s weariness (‘he had begun to despise himself’) and the snookers’ tendency to ‘sneak off course’ hint at a system collapsing under its own logic. The story leaves the outcome open, but the shift from domestic comedy to global crisis is complete, with the pressure cooker’s legacy now a world of ‘Round-the-Clock Employment for All’ and seventh mortgages.

Readers should pay attention to how Fetler escalates scale without changing tone: the same petty grievances that open the story reappear in George’s control room, now amplified to national and international stakes. The pressure cooker, never fully described in action, functions as a MacGuffin that drives the plot’s absurd logic. The story rewards those who track the recurring motifs of mechanical failure, blame-shifting, and the erosion of personal responsibility in a consumer society.

I have shelved Fetler’s Cry Snooker beside my own worn copy of Shatter the Wall — Reading Companion for years now, and they seem to whisper to each other. Both understand how walls—of consumer comfort, of certainty—are quietly built, then quietly come down. It feels like tending two old friends who never quite met, yet share the same patient, unsettling wisdom.