BOOK REVIEW OF Jerzy Kosinski's National Book Award 1969 Novel, STEPS

BOOK REVIEW of National Book Award (1969) novel of STEPS by Jerzy Kosinski

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 31, 2008

Reference: Amazon.com requested that I submit a review of this novel for their website. It follows.



My agent, Ned Hamson, knowing I was writing an unconventional novel of my experience in South Africa as a young American executive (GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA) during apartheid, suggested I read STEPS.

Kosinski and I were born in the same year at opposite ends of the bloody Second World War. He never had time for innocence while I was an American boy held safely in her bosom in Middle America. All that was shattered for me when I went to South Africa as a young executive to form a new chemical company in 1968, the year before Kosinski won the National Book Award for STEPS.

I not only read this novel and his other works of fiction, but also James Park Sloan's biography, JERZY KOSINSKI.

STEPS and other Kosinski fiction demonstrate a mind that has been shattered by people he admires and people he finds out to be both brutal and brutish. THE PAINTED BIRD is an unexpurgated version of reality as a bookend to Alan Paton's TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE. Both authors deal with the inhumanity of man to man, but Kosinski chooses to walk the tightrope of despair and psychosexual fantasy.

Kosinski and I are both trained social scientists and published authors in that discipline. He went to one of the most prestigious universities in the country (Columbia) and had difficulty with his faculty advisers and never acquired his Ph.D. I had similar problems only I found my way from land grant institutions (Iowa, and University of South Florida) to safe haven in the university system of the future, writing my dissertation and defense for Walden University, a fully accredited university but not yet prestigious in the same sense as the Ivy League.

STEPS is a triumph of mind over matter and soul over eternity, a book that will stay with you the way Sherwood Anderson’s WINESBURG, OHIO does which was written for an earlier generation. Kosinski saw life naked, undisguised, and as Joseph Campbell might add, a time that never rose above its sexual organs or its lust for power and pleasure.

STEPS is concise, anecdotal and experimental the way James Joyce’s ULYSSES was. The anecdotes are connected by style, mood, and tone that bite the psyche as if it had teeth. You know the work is art because the fragments hold together like an illuminating collage.

STEPS shows an intensely grim world characterized by brutality, exploitation, and calloused indifference. The impact is like a nightmare where violence breeds only more violence, and the protagonist is lost in the maze of emotion with no way out.

Many of the incidents in STEPS depict sexual exploitation. It is the predator-prey dance where the narrator exploits a woman, but he himself becomes the victim. In one instance, the narrator, an archeological student stranded without money on an island, collapses from hunger. Two fat old women feed him and then assault him sexually.

Among the scenes of perversion, many include accounts of sexual pleasure being derived from inflicting or witnessing pain. Sociological studies of Theodore Adorno (Authoritarian Personality) and Erich Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) come to mind to confirm Kosinski’s thesis.

STEPS captures the whirling dervish of postmodern society with no leavening with virtue. Most of the episodes present actions of lust, greed, brutality, and corruption without mitigating circumstances, a little like watching the nightly news on television.

STEPS could be viewed as a series of “dirty” anecdotes. The reality it portrays is the vicious and perverted side of life debased from human nature.

STEPS suggest narcissistic disassociation of a single person, or perhaps a series of people. That is the subtle strength of its fragmentation and a narrator who is never identified, leaving open the possibility that different narrators are functioning in the various episodes. In any case, regardless of the reader’s reaction, the concrete style and raw intensity of the actions are not likely to be quickly dismissed from the mind of the reader.

To give you a sense of the fickle nature of publishing, 21-pages of STEPS was sent to its original publisher and several others six years after it had won the National Book Award. All turned it down. In 1981, the entire text of STEPS was sent to several literary agents and was turned down again by everyone. Kosinski committed suicide in 1991 at the age of 57, hounded by detractors, none of whom recognized his genius. If you are a writer, take note and persist.