Satan's Soap Opera
DEEMER, CHARLES
Satan's Soap Opera Cockpit By Jerzy Kosinski Houghton Mifflin. 248 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer Jerzy Kosinski ends his new novel with a question from...
...Mere deception and manipulation become commonplace...
...The question haunts...
...Reviewed by Charles Deemer Playwright, short-story writer Jerzy Kosinski ends his new novel with a question from Dos-toevsky's The Possessed: "Who will understand the true reasons for the confession...
...Since he is something of a pervert to boot, his curious confessions are more kinky, and I suppose more interesting, than they might have been if Tarden were Satan Senile...
...He makes love to countless women brought to him by Theodora, who wants to gather his sperm and have his child...
...As in less menacing soap operas, the novel's best moments are satiric...
...The temptation is to put Tarden into a soap opera and title it "Evil Conquers All...
...The cards are stacked...
...But I am bewildered by this book, even though I am impressed and amused by some of its episodes...
...He takes and collects obscene photographs...
...This one is for the devotee with a strong stomach, a dark mood, and a yen for literary puzzles...
...surely I must assume the failure here is mine before I assert that it is his...
...Tarden can get away with anything...
...Fortunately, Kosinski has a sense of humor that emerges in Tar-den's confessions, so that the parts of this novel are much more than the whole...
...No one challenges Tarden, no one calls his bluffs, no one tells him to get lost...
...I can't accept the implication that his world of horrors is the mirror of our own...
...It is as if Kosinski knows very well he has written a difficult book and wants to conclude with the suggestion that the reader try again...
...He does so at will, his wealth giving him the leisure to travel around the globe, his spy training the expertise to deceive and manipulate...
...Indeed, Cockpit is worth reading for the half-dozen scenes where insight is delivered with a wry smile...
...But just as Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna's creator, can be faulted for failing to see man's dark side, Kosinski in this book is too often possessed by total gloom...
...After cleverly escaping from the Palace of Science and Culture in an Eastern European country, the adult Tarden rooms with a psychopath who tries to kill him, reminding us of "the estrangement that may lie beneath apparent mutual understanding...
...Yet it is the very conquering that is least convincing...
...A bizarre life, his...
...Because he can lie so successfully, he can do whatever is most upsetting...
...each (even an old woman) is saving herself for a husband and will do anything except receive him...
...Cockpit, then, is no easy read and certainly not the place for an introduction to Kosinski...
...I do not deny that there is evil in the world, that horrors like him (for he is the real horror here) exist...
...I cannot survive unless I can order every aspect of my existence," he tells us, and this requires that he control, or at least intrude upon, the lives of others as well...
...In a third, he is suddenly impotent while in bed with a beautiful woman whom he has taken pains to seduce...
...In one, Tarden roams the streets looking for a prostitute who will allow him to enter her, but each one he encounters is a virgin...
...Surely a writer of his proven talent has the right to do this...
...Also the point, perhaps, but again too readily made...
...If this is the point, that deceit is the world's norm, it is too easily made...
...Next Issue Christmas Books PEARL K. BELL GIL CARL ALROY ALBERT BERMEL HOPE HALE DAVIS MARVIN KITMAN HILTON KRAMER KERMIT LANSNER ROBERT LEKACHMAN CURT LEVIANT PHOEBE PETTINGELL VIVIEN RAYNOR DIANE RAVITCH RAYMOND ROSENTHAL HARRISON E. SALISBURY BOB SCHIEFFER DANIEL SCHORR JOHN SIMON ELIE WIESEL DENNIS H WRONG...
...As a child, he tortured animals and tried to kill playmates...
...In another, Tarden dons a uniform designed to his specifications, happily returning the salutes of soldiers and policemen...
...Tarden, the novel's narrator-confessor, is too exaggerated a caricature of man's dark side to be convincing...
...The Painted Bird remains his most accessible work...
...Nevertheless, it seems to me that the vision of reality Tarden represents is one-sided...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
