With the writing of Steps, Kosinski joins the company of postmodernist experimental novelists, like the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, theoretician and practitioner of the "new novel" and American writers like John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth. Such writers rejected the tradi tional novel and sought to evolve forms that they judged more appropriate to the contemporary consciousness and its views of reality. For example, the influential Robbe-Grillet, with whom Kosinski is familiar, believes that conventional plots are distortions of reality and that the writer should not pretend to be able to explain the psychology or motivation of someone else. One of his key tenets is that the natural world must not be interpreted in human terms but simply presented as it is, in its "thereness" visually and sensually — "a smooth surface without signification, without soul, within vision, on which we no longer have any...