There are certain great moments in fiction, when the vast mists of the world suddenly part; Blind Date has one of them: 'Levanter could not speak. Mute, dispirited, he started the engine. Without pausing to look back, Jaques Monod walked away. As he started to climb the steps to the house, the last rays of the setting sun wrapped him in their glow.' I haven't come across such a potent combination of effects since I last opened an American novel, but the mixture here of name-dropping, cheap romance and rather precious fictionalising succeeds mainly by being worse than anything that has come before it. Ragtime turned this particular tone into an industrial process. It consists of saying as little as possible in the largest possible space—while at the same time convincing the reader that he is part of an amazing and genuinely historical experience. But the flatness of the writing here is peculiarly un-American; Kosinski himself is of European origin, and so he tries hard to avoid the flashiness of his contemporaries. He provides the emptiness, but without the rhetoric.
The tone of the book is unsettling: at one moment we dive into the wide-eyed breathlessness of conventional romantic fiction (where girls are girls, and 'Levanter studied the shadows her lashes cast on her cheeks …'), and at the next we're in the City of the Night where Levanter, the 'hero' of the novel, cuts through the undergrowth like a chainsaw…. It is always easy to load one character with … many meretricious blessings, but it's difficult to make him interesting as a result. Characters fade in a novel unless they are comprehensible or sympathetic: Levanter is a creature of fantasy and, like all fantasies, he becomes quickly and irredeemably boring….
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