Trebles

By Stefan Kanfer

PINBALL

by Jerzy Kosinski Bantam; 287 pages; $14.95 (hardback) $7.95 (paper)

Of all hazardous materials handled by Jerzy Kosinski, none has been as volatile as the metaphor. Properly used, it illumined a century; in The Painted Bird (1965) the speechless child became a great symbol of the inadequacy of language confronted by atrocity. In Being There (1971) the hero, Chance, acutely parodied the modern condition: he was a blank; the cyclopean screen was full of ideas.

But in recent works, Kosinski's metaphors have proved unstable. Life was presented, with mixed results, as a cockpit, a series of blind dates, a skirmish on a polo field. In his latest novel, existence is viewed as a pinball machine complete with odd caroms and freighted signs: BEGIN GAME. ONE TO FOUR CAN PLAY. The device obscures an intriguing notion What if America's greatest rock star was unseen by the public, known only by his voice? The man who lived at the top of the charts would be as disembodied as a ghost and as influential as a President.

His name is Goddard and he becomes the elusive quarry of Pinball, pursued by Domostroy, a burned-out composer whose trebles are all behind him. Like almost all Kosinski heroes, Domostroy is an adrenal wanderer, ready for any existential errand. His employer is the beautiful groupie Andrea Gwynplaine, who mails Goddard hard-core snapshots and waits for him to emerge, panting, from his lair. With Domostroy's collaboration, she manages to run her quarry to earth. But Andrea's success is her undoing: her purpose is not worship but murder, and Goddard's is not obscurity but survival.

On the trail, exclamations detonate with the force of comic-strip balloons: "You have such light eyes and fair skin!" "I know who you are!" "Yes I do!" Yet, despite these excesses, Pinball has its payoffs. Throughout his prolific career, Kosinski has been a novelist of ideas, and his observations of the American way of lifestyle have kept their salinity. He deftly lampoons contemporary lyrics, his scenes of the South Bronx seem torn from a Bosch triptych, and his discussions of classical music are informed with the insights of a connoisseur.

This has been a peculiar period for Kosinski. He is one of the best actors in Reds, and he supported and later repudiated the parole of convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott. These excursions on nonliterary turf may have contributed to the inconsistencies of a work that, in the end, can only prompt admirers to respond: "What a premise!" "What talent!" "What a waste!"

--By Stefan Kanfer

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.