Prurience
Peter Ackroyd
Blind Date Jerzy Kosinski (Hutchinson £4.95) 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! last opened an American novel, but the mixture here of name-dropping, cheap romance and rather precious fictionalising succeeds mainly by being worse than anything that has come before it. Ragtime turned this particular tone into an industrial process. It consists of saying as little as possible in the largest possible space — while at the same time convincing the reader that he is part of an amazing and genuinely historical experience. But the flatness of the writing here is peculiarly un-American; Kosinski himself is of European origin, and so he tries hard to avoid the flashiness of his contemporaries. He provides the emptiness, but without the rhetoric.
The tone of the book is unsettling: at one moment we dive into the wide-eyed breathlessness of conventional romantic fiction (where girls are girls, and `Levanter studied the shadows her lashes cast on her cheeks . . .'), and at the next we're in the City of the Night where Levanter, the 'hero' of the novel, cuts through the undergrowth like a chainsaw. He sleeps with his mother, with a transsexual, with a real woman, and with himself; he kills people and he tricks people; he has a conscience, and he has a heart. It is always easy to load one character with so many meretricious blessings, but it's difficult to make him interesting as a result. Characters fade in a novel unless they are comprehensible or sympathetic: Levanter is a creature of fantasy and, like all fantasies, he becomes quickly and irredeemably boring. He could climb the Eiffel Tower while balancing a poisoned orange on his nose, but he won't survive if his dialogue is flatulent and the general context is banal.
Kosinski must realise this in part, since he has divided the novel into a number of separate but unrelated episodes, so the reader can switch off at any point without actually missing very much. Levanter is Russian expatriate, now living in America and representing something known as Investors International, who has given up career of athletic and mental prowess in order to play a few absurd confidence tricks, fight for 'natural justice' and deluge his libido in some watery scenes. But none of it really adds up to much, and the narrative flaps and crawls along the ground as the fictional puppets are introduced alongside Charles Lindbergh, Monod, and even Svet• lana Alliluyeva. Kosinski has clearly included everyone and everything he can think of, on the principle that bad writing abhors a vacuum — even when it is one of its own making. But when real figures jostle beside fictional characters, narratives become troublesome and ambiguous; fantasies can be disastrous if the line between life and art isn't carefully measured and maintained.
In fact that line is blurred only for suspect purposes, when the imagination is not strong enough and life is not real enough. And in order to confer a solid identity upon
Levanter, this creature of his imaginings, Kosinski has had to create a two dimensional world which will act as a support. One dimension stretches into some fantasy of sexuality and virility, where all the usual cliches are brought into play, and the other wanders out into some half-real world where Levanter meets important people and thereby becomes important himself. It is the usual alchemy of false writing.
And so the novel founders on unreality; since Kosinski doesn't recognise, let alone acknowledge, the ambiguities that surround his central figure, Levanter simply becomes a vehicle for grey fantasies and brutually prurient acts. When a character is only cypher, anything can happen to it. At one moment Levanter is the great lover, and at the next he is a sadistic killer: 'When the entire blade had penetrated, the corpse lay motionless. Levanter covered it With sheet.' And then, as if Kosinski were trying to prove that life can be as banal as his art, all of this is followed by some idiotic 'realistic' posturing. 'Knowing Jaques Monod did not have much time left, Levanter decided to go to Cannes to be with him.' I don't know if Monod would care to spend his last hours on earth with a sadistic murderer, but it's certainly no fun for the reader.
Living people — that includes you and me, who have to read the stuff, let alone Monod — are diminished and cheapened by a book which treats everyone as an object of prurient fantasy. The fact that Kosinski drags in real human suffering almost as an after-thought — he deals at some length, and inexplicably, with the Sharon Tate killings — only makes his attempts at significance and 'meaning' all the more gratuitous and unpleasant. Death is the easiest merchandise for a bad writer. And Blind Date makes Mein Kampf seem like a miracle of good taste.
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