When Going Is the Goal

By Stefan Kanfer

PASSION PLAY by Jerzy Kosinski; St. Martin's Press; 271 pages; $10.95

Jerzy Kosinski's heroes have become dependable literary fixtures, as recognizable as Kafka's K. or Beckett's tramps. Rootless, quixotic, warped by an anti-childhood in Holocaust Europe, they traverse the American landscape like knights-errant on a futile search for purpose.

In Passion Play, Kosinski's seventh novel, the man's name is Fabian. But in essence he is the bloodless Levanter of Blind Date (1977), the vengeful wanderer Tarden of Cockpit (1975) and the haunted boy in Kosinski's first and best fiction, The Painted Bird. Fabian differs from his predecessors chiefly in occupation: he is a competitive horseman. The aging jockey plays a strange sort of polo -- a one-on-one contest in which animal and rider become a single figure jousting on a timeless range. Like many equestrians, Kosinski's rider is graceful on horseback; dismounted from his horse, Big Lick, he becomes one more high-plains drifter out for an evening's gratification.

It is not hard to find. In the Midwest or the desert, in banana republics or along the Florida gold coast, Fabian's mobile VanHome is seldom without its lady for the evening. Adolescents, sophisticates, even transsexuals are all given equal time. Yet the warning sign on Fabian's van says more about its owner than about the alarm system: SELF-REACTOR: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. In this picaresque, passion is reserved for the playing field. Despite his experiments with sex and drugs, Fabian truly gets high on Fabian. With characteristic insouciance, the author describes his hero's liaisons: "He found himself selecting, isolating, soliciting partners as transient and avid as himself, as ready to initiate, as willing to discard."

This centerfold prose disfigures the novel and makes a few paragraphs indistinguishable from Harold Robbins at the gallop: "When she arrived, the flare of her seductive allure would be in full glow, the meld of her sexuality fired by the challenge of another woman." Fortunately, Kosinski's kinks are a minor portion of Passion Play. The reader who can get past horse-and-lady scenes that bear no relation to International Velvet will be rewarded with passages of great force.

The author has been around the track in every sense; he knows the sound and aroma of mornings when the woods seem to renew themselves as the rider watches; his descriptions of equestrian combat belong on the same shelf with Hemingway and Tolstoy. His accounts of a South American republic where the main sources of power are the ox and the jet are masterpieces of irony and pure narrative. He tirelessly examines what he terms "the regency of pain." Like Dostoyevsky's, Kosinski's characters explore their own souls, always reaching for limits. Fabian even visits hospitals where he knows no patient, forcing himself to meet the in curable, to witness the most vulnerable lives. The results are never less than compelling, but they are never more than set pieces.

The fault, like the virtue, is the author's. He writes powerful interludes, only to vandalize them by reducing his characters to prototypes. By midnovel, Fabian is shown to be, in his creator's phrase, "a portable man," at home everywhere and nowhere. Like other Kosinski men, he is unable to love without domination or lose without humiliation. His fears are for himself, not for the human condition; his vaunted independence is merely a lack of compassion. His wanderings are like those of the brain-damaged who range farther away from an object when they try to approach it.

Kosinski is 46, and readers have a right to wonder whether his unparalleled ear for language and his eye for social nuance are to be used solely for elaborations of the same theme. For the past several books, Kosinski has been as aimless as his characters who believe that the going is the goal. That is not true for polo. It is even less so for novelists, even gifted ones. --Stefan Kanfer

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