Tilting

IT'S SCARY discovering your own vulnerability for the first time and having to acknowledge the shells we build around ourselves--those delicate shells we show the world and fool ourselves with too. The folks prancing on stage at the Rocky Horror Picture Show each week have power over their audience because they take no risks and reveal nothing of themselves. Their costumes can never change, and even their hand movements and nervous tics are choreographed. On Friday night at midnight the weekday working stiff is temporarily absolved of all responsibility, hidden behind a satin and greasepaint shell.

Retreating into a shell is harder for those endlessly hounded by autograph-seeking clones and garbage-picking tabloid reporters--often, a pair of sunglasses is the only barrier. But in Jerzy Kosinski's Pinball, rock star Goddard not only manages to escape the publicity bubble but to leave it behind intact. In six years Goddard has struck gold on album after album, selling more records than any other rock star. In those six years, though, Goddard has never given a concert, interview or autograph. He has maintained a better secret identity than Superman. Even Lois Lane was suspicious; Goddard's manager has never met him.

But Andrea Kosinski wants to meet him. She says that because she is his public she has a right to. Goddard remembers that John Lennon's public killed him and continues hiding his identity even from his parents. To unmask Goddard, Andre enlists the unlikely help of Patrick Domostroy, a once prominent classical composer perfectly content at being reduced to playing the piano at a "pinball joint that tries to pass for a nightclub." Like most of Kosinski's heros, Domostroy lives on the fringes of normal morality and society. In an abandoned ballroom in the South Bronx, he spends his time feeding his rather unusual sexual appetite, playing the piano for gas money and drawing royalties.

Of Pinball's four major characters, Kosinski is most comfortable with Domostroy, and he puts a lot of himself--including his Eastern European origins--into his composer turned detective. Like his creator, who played Grigory Zinoviev in Reds, Domostroy at the height of his popularity once played "a Russian composer in an epic Hollywood film."

More than anything. Domostroy inherits Kosinski's well-known sexual obsessions. In the book, Andrea buys Domostroy's help with her body and a closet full of costumes and toys, and their gymnastic encounters as well as most everyone else's are pointedly detailed. In real life, Kosinski makes no attempt to hide his personal obsession and is a frequent visitor to private New York sex clubs.

KOSINSKI, THEN, knows sex and fame well and writes about them easily. But although he has obviously learned rock music, he seems to lack the familiarity to write believably about it or the guns and violence he forces into the final chapter. He devises a plot that is convincing, though dependent on a couple of questionable coincidences, concerning Domostroy and Andrea's plot to discover Goddard's identity. The trouble is that he doesn't know what to do once he has. Unlike his novel Being There, which dragged out its single idea for 15 pages too many, Pinball disintegrates, as the author destroys the whole subtlety of the search in a bizarre violent finish.

When Goddard and Andrea finally meet, Kosinski demonstrates his conviction that letting a shell slip is always suicidal. Insultingly, though, he is not brave enough to let us appreciate a subtle message, but subjects us to a bloodbath to drive home a fear we all share. His conclusion is not only heavyhanded, but upsetting in what it seems to advise. The fear of being hurt is real, but one we must accept as a worthwhile risk. Opening one's shell is always dangerous, but like Goddard we all need someone to trust. Staying secure inside a shell is lonely, and sometimes we have to take that leap of faith and leave ourselves vulnerable.