Jerzy Kosinski's novels lie in the area between the post-war European emotional lucidity and the hip coolness of American mid-generation. His is a non-judgmental, morally permissive fiction, in which action is meant not as salvation, but as making the most of life. In Kosinski's novels, man does not have a character by which he is doomed; he adjusts himself to reality by denying his civilized self and his moral judgment. He forms a personality-free character in a personality-free world. Kosins...

Jerzy Kosinski's second novel, Steps (1968), is made up of a series of vignettes set in Poland during and after WWII, and in "the West." Always the setting is exotic; always we sense, in Thoreau's phrase, that we are immersed "in dreams awake." The protagonist-narrator of Steps is alternately the dark-complected boy of Kosinski's first novel, The Painted Bird (1965), and that same boy as an adult. He is variously a waif, soldier, photographer, waiter, day lab...

I have been mulling over the sense of dreariness [Kosinski] provokes—a dreariness quite separate from that conjured up by his venomous outlook on life. He presents a brutal, anarchic world, where only the man who takes things into his own hands is commendable. His famous flat tone has been interpreted as an emblem of the flatness of modern life. The trouble is that the symbolism fails; the books refuse to produce the overtones that dozens of reviewers (and the author) have hopefully and earnestly sou...

The heroes of [Kosinski's] novels are lonely and anonymous men, outsiders, never with an everyday profession. In Blind Date, the hero was called Levanter; in Passion Play, Fabian. These men have colorless stage names and they themselves are almost indistinguishable from one another. They are usually refugees or escapees from Eastern Europe…. Many authors keep such a distance from their books that it would be improper to look for a link between them and their protagonists. Not so with Kosinski....

Jerzy Kosinski takes on some new subject matter—polo, horsemanship and public sex—in his seventh novel, Passion Play, yet these things are not really his new territory. What he presents are the further psychological adventures of the Kosinski hero, who is now as recognizable as the Hemingway hero used to be. But what is genuinely new in Passion Play is that Kosinski's hero grows older; and we are treated to the continuing struggles of the boy from The Painted Bird who became the man fro...

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, ch...

Kosinski's novels consist of many … episodes, self-enclosed stories that reflect two of the novel's most traditional interests, the telling of interesting tales and the description of how something is done. His stories of psychological manipulation strike, unfortunately, a responsive chord in us all, just as his descriptions of how to make and use the hardware of our culture is closer to us than, say, a description of how to catch and cook a whale. But rather than Moby Dick, Cockpit wil...

Jerzy Kosinski calls George Levanter, the hero of his novel "Blind Date," a "small investor." But to me he is more like a claims adjuster in the ambiguous morality of the modern world. Among other things, Levanter is a skier and, as the West declines, he finds sport on its slope…. When Levanter rapes a beautiful young girl whom he might legitimately have won, he does it simply because it is admissible in his morality. [Here] one feels that the author is dealing in cynical ...

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 Coc...

[Passion Play] displays a familiar mixture: a protagonist whose life is a series of disconnected steps leading nowhere, women who are more vagina than mind, existential meditations, and explicitly described physical torture. This time, however, the hero rides higher than usual. (p. 52) Kosinski's undeniable prowess as a scene-maker has never seemed more evident than in the exciting polo matches and seductions in these pages. Ironically, though, the power plays and love games all remain quite cheerles...

["Passion Play" gives] Kosinski the opportunity to engage in some virtuoso writing about sex and horsemanship, which is sometimes fun to read. He is very good at setting up the big scene, the sporting event, the spectacle…. But such scenes, more often than not, seem to intrude upon the narrative. We know from the jacket copy and the Cervantes epigraph that we are in the presence of a modern knight-errant, and indeed the idea of a picaresque novel written by someone with Kosinski'...

Kosinski's fantasy world is a place of such barren superficiality and murderous frustration that it often reads like the case-history of a vindictive neurotic. For all its dreams of positive action and complete power, Blind Date is an ignorant account of [a] drab hell…. The trouble is that he actually believes he's writing fiction…. (p. 194) Tom Paulin, in New Statesman (© 1978 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), February 10, 1978.