Bird of Prey

STEPS by Jerzy Kosinski. 148 pages. Random House. $4.95.

In his semiautobiographical first novel, The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski told of a six-year-old Eastern European city boy who is set adrift in the countryside during World War II and physically and emotionally brutalized by peasants. The painfully symbolic title refers to one rustic's practice of daubing a captured bird with bright colors, releasing it, and then watching an incensed flock peck it to death.

Steps might well be read as an account of the consequences of a childhood schooled by atrocities. Kosinski, who was born in Poland and now lives in the U.S., keeps the relationship between the two books vague, but the almost autistic state of mind and the prose-voice in both are nearly identical. It is the flat, emotionless tone of the survivor whose shattering experiences have set him outside the conventional boundaries of the human race. No longer capable of giving or receiving compassion, the victim--the painted bird--has survived and grown into a bird of prey that thrives on acts of voyeurism, cruelty and revenge.

In disconnected episodes, the narrator of Steps reveals a condition of obsession that is all the more horrifying because of its controlled willfulness and absence of passion and spontaneity. He lures a young girl away from her village with a deck of credit cards. He observes sodomy between a woman and a "large animal" and wonders whether her cries are just part of the act. He hovers over the body of a woman wasting away with TB. He humiliates a girl by talking on the telephone while making love to her. In another episode, he is again the boy in a hostile village. But now he strikes back by feeding fishhooks to the children of his tormentors.

Some of Kosinski's treatment of Communism is pure Gogol. Says one freedom-starved university student: "I've discovered more than thirty public buildings in different parts of the city, all with temples like this, all waiting for me." He is referring not to clandestine churches but to the freest places in the country--the stalls in public toilets. Elsewhere the narrator attends a party reception and observes a disaffected scientist pinning foil-wrapped condoms to the chests of unsuspecting apparatchiks.

But such comic relief is overwhelmed by the savage purity of Kosinski's vision --that of a man stripped of all humane conventions and in complete control of his impulses and appetites. In fact, the protagonist's obsession with control becomes indistinguishable from the book itself. Every word is weighted to produce the precise tension that each episode calls for. The effect is hypnotic but short-lived. For unlike The Painted Bird, this novel lacks the grounding situation, the structure and the connective tissue that could have made it more than a rather abstract expression of a pathological state of mind.

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