A New Jerzy

FICTION, of late, has occasionally suffered from a peculiar kind of affliction. Many modern novelists, given the temper of the times, have viewed the world as a grim, inhuman place, and that view has paralyzed them as much as it has inspired them. Practitioners of the Literature of Impotence and Exhaustion, for example, have tended to become impotent and exhausted. Samuel Beckett, unable even to bewail further the impossibility of expression, has written nothing of significance for twenty years now, except for a few anguished fragments (his publishers have taken to offering new tran-slations of old, discarded texts). John Barth, last he was heard from, was searching for a literary mode that hadn't been sucked dry of every possibility of freshness.

Jerzy Kosinski has never been in the mainstream of this particular movement, and he manages to keep writing, evidently comfortable with his very characteristic narrative style. Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski writes a clean, workmanlike English: fluid enough, if not exactly mellifluous, but always steely and gray. Beckett, who also chose to write in a language not his own, did so, in an odd way, for the discipline; Kosinski has said that English, for him, is a language of bare bones, lacking the richness of a lifetime of connotations. At the end of The Devil Tree, Kosinski's last novel, the hero undergoes a sort of change of consciousness.

he sensed only surfaces. Forms became empty figures without gravity or weight. He closed his eyes, blotting out the flat shapes that used to have dimension and meaning in his life, and the sounds that used to have resonance.

This is the way Kosinski uses words: without gravity or resonance.

There is some perversity in using language to desiccate, rather than to enrich, and some danger. The risk Kosinski takes is like the risk Beckett and Barth took; the barrenness of his words and of his landscapes threaten to consume the whole. A Literature of Desolation that engenders only desolate novels is, to say the least, self-defeating.

SOMEHOW, though, Kosinski's early novels achieved a startling intensity of expression. The horrors witnessed by a child refugee in the villages of a malign, warravaged Eastern Europe in The Painted Bird take on an added dimension in its clinical, matter-of-fact narratives.

Very much a product of the holocaust, Kosinski imagined and reimagined with every new novel a world of the grimmest desolation. When his novels have lived, it has never been by virtue of any particular humanity or warmth. At his best, Kosinski is a novelist of terror: The Painted Bird and Steps were catalogues of lurid atrocities, accounts of sadism, bestiality, and so forth, every one more horrible than the last. Kosinski's precise, emotionless prose didn't just render those atrocities in all their harsh reality; it became a part of the horror, inhuman beyond mere colorlessness. Kosinski's bestial imagination hasn't failed him in his new novel: the episodes of rape and dismemberment are as brutal and varied as ever. But there is something missing, some sense of the bizarre and the demonic that inspired his early novels and, where they were inhumanly strong, Cockpit seems in the end only inhuman.

The central metaphor of Cockpit is a bicycle wheel that the narrator remembers playing with as a child. He would run along behind it, pushing it forward and controlling its path with a wooden stick: so, as an adult, he manipulates the lives of people he encounters.

Whom shall I draw out of the anonymous crowd of faces surrounding me? I can enter their worlds unobserved and unchecked. Each person is a wheel to follow, and at any moment my manner, my language, my being, like the stick I used as a boy, will drive the wheel where I urge it to go.

The narrator, Tarden, is the agent of the horrors suffered by the brutalized boy in The Painted Bird and perhaps his inevitable successor. Where the boy was tortured by a primitive, irrational peasantry, Tarden is the tormentor, choosing his victims arbitrarily and without passion. As a child of three, he recalls, Tarden plunged a pair of scissors into the breast of his nurse; he remembers watching the purple stain spreading through her blouse. He moves on to varieties of cruelty that defy, one would have thought, imagining.

Tarden isn't always the perpetrator of Cockpit's atrocities. Sometimes, as in Steps, he is only a witness; occasionally he is the victim. Once in a while, in his apparently motiveless interference in people's lives, he does them a good turn. In the process, we don't learn very much about him. He has an apparently limitless amount of money, and an extraordinary intelligence for survival (he boasts of this). He describes some of his past in a sketchy and idealized way: he managed by cunning to escape from a totalitarian, evidently EasternEuropean state; in the United States he joined and then left "the Service," apparently something like the CIA. Now he travels around, maintaining a number of high-rise apartments in different cities, under different pseudonyms.

So as not to diminish the impersonality of Kosinski's narrative technique, Tarden says virtually nothing about how he feels, or about what sort of person he is. Once or twice he relates a view of him reflected in the perceptions of some third person, as when he eavesdrops on a mistress describing him to someone else; on those occasions it is as if a bit of recognizable reality has accidentally made its way into Tarden's nightmarish, monomaniacal descriptions of torture and death. There is no question but that Kosinski is a fiction writer of considerable craft, as well as imagination. These few breaths of conventionality--one person saying that women make Tarden feel inferior, another simply that he has bony features--show the limitations of Tarden's vision, and simultaneously cast doubt on our own.

THE WORLD of Cockpit is not only barren, it is random and irrational. Tarden's obsession with power is a way of fighting the absolute dominion of chance and accident, a way (he reverses Faulkner's phrase) of surviving where most people only know how to endure. Tarden blinds an armed attacker by luring him into a room used for treating photographic plates with powerful quartz lights. That man, he says, was a fool for taking so few precautions. Tarden, on the other hand, hooks his feet around the legs of chairs so they can't be pulled out from under him, looks back when he enters buildings and equips all his apartments with explosives and listening devices.

But even Tarden cannot endure beyond the limits of chance and his own mortality. His tireless self-confidence finally shaken by a narrow escape from a broken elevator in one of his high-rise apartment buildings, he conjures up this final, barren image:

...a great old army tank, hit decades ago by an enemy shell, sunken in a shallow lagoon. The iron flaps of the tank's turret are rusted open, steadily washed over by the waves; its corroded gun defiantly trains on trenches and machine-gun nests, long buried in the sands of a deserted beach.

Sweating and vomiting, trapped by the weakness of his body, Tarden is still in the cockpit. The limitations of Tarden's religion of power, suggested before, are finally confirmed. All that's left, in this bitter novel, is an unredeemed sense of futility.