Because Jerzy Kosinski has given us several important novels, the temptation is to talk about Cockpit as if it were significant. I could say all the things that other reviewers have said and will say—Cockpit is a metaphor of modern life, a study of the depersonalization that threatens from within and from without, a biting satire on what the cold-war-detente state makes of its brightest, a warning of the danger that threatens our lives and our sanity, and so on. But I would not believe it because Cockpit just does not work. Despite the overall slickness of presentation, the reason is at least partly technical; it is a failure in that crucial area where a failure of technique is also a failure of theme.

One of the sounder clichés of modern literary criticism is that a genuine work of art earns its meaning. That is, it...