Strike It Rich

By John Shaw

THE DEVIL TREE by JERZY KOSINSKI 208 pages. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. $6.95.

Postulate a neurotic, hopeless main character, then spend 200 pages proving that the character is hopeless and neurotic. Occasionally a novelist succeeds with such an attenuation of the obvious. Joan Didion did, after a fashion, with Play It As It Lays. In this sour, stunted, perfunctory tale of a numbed rich boy, Jerzy Kosinski does not.

The novel's situation--it is too static to be called a plot--seems better suited to one of Harold Robbins' meat operas than to the work of a man who once won the National Book Award (for Steps) and who is now a professor of prose and criticism at Yale. Kosinski's hero, Jonathan Whalen, is sole heir to one of the nation's great industrial fortunes, and to a remarkably ordinary set of psychological wounds. Whalen's father, a tycoon now dead, gave his son insufficient attention, and seems thereby to be the villain of the story--unless the villain is the new industrial state, or Western civilization itself.

At any rate, young Whalen is an ex-junky, an inept lecher, and a petulant, sadistic jerk. Even such a figure might conceivably be observed to good effect, but Kosinski perceives nothing of unusual interest in the homunculus he has created. A succession of brief, turgid scenes demonstrates Whalen's emptiness, a quality that is never in doubt; nothing in the book offers any insight into the author's reasons for pursuing such an unrewarding project. One of Kosinski's few gestures toward literary excellence amounts to a stylistic tic: his repeated use of Grim Bits from Mother Nature to give symbolic weight to Whalen's flounders. The grotesque baobab tree, we learn, seems to have its branches in the earth and its roots in the air; a certain species of African bird can soar gracefully, but nearly always crashes when it lands, with the result that the earth beneath its air space is littered with broken, still living hulks. Heavy stuff, and not surprisingly it drops through the tissue of Kosinski's prose and sinks out of sight.

The author's other novels are as impressive as this one is futile. The Painted Bird follows the frightful journey of a small boy as he stumbles through war-torn Poland searching for his parents, while Steps observes a refugee's nightmarish encounters with America. A reader trying to account for the disparity between those books and The Devil Tree is driven to the not entirely convincing conclusion that Kosinski, who is a Pole, has strayed too far from his artistic roots. -John Skow

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