Dead End

By Paul Gray

BLIND DATE

by Jerzy Kosinski

Hough ton Mifflin; 236 pages; $8.95

Jerzy Kosinski's sixth novel takes up where Cockpit, his previous bestseller, took up: an international adventurer glides through a modern landscape as ugly and alluring as sin. George Levanter, an Eastern European refugee from Nazi and Soviet persecution, is a "self-employed idea man." In fact he works in some hazy free-lance fashion for a firm called Investors International and follows a circular itinerary from the Swiss Alps to Beverly Hills and back to the snow again.

As before, Kosinski turns his hero's journeys into a travelogue of depravity. By the time Levanter is 15, he has already literalized the Oedipal drama with his mother and participated in the brutal rape of a teen-age girl at a Communist Party youth camp. Afflicted with a moral numbness, he now hovers like a kestrel over scenes of potential folly. Word that a Midwest U.S. hotel has booked a convention of the "Alliance for Small Americans," for example, sends Levanter flying to the scene; he wants to be on hand when the hotel discovers that its guests are not Boy Scouts but a collection of dwarfs and midgets.

At such moments, Levanter resembles Guy Grand, the cartoon millionaire-sadist in Terry Southern's The Magic Christian--a similarity that does no credit to Kosinski. But Levanter is not content merely to engineer or observe acts of humiliation. He is also an avenging angel. At an Alpine ski resort he blows up the vacationing henchman who tortures the subjects of a Middle East potentate. He devises an excruciating end for a New York hotel clerk who betrays visiting Eastern European guests to their native apparatchiks. This deed over, Levanter privately gloats because authorities cannot discover a plot linking killer and victim. As he does so, the murder is already fading from memory: "It was nothing but an old Polaroid snapshot; no negative, photographer unknown, camera thrown away."

Kosinski's novel is an assemblage of such images. His art once again enlists itself in the service of random violence (the hero of one of his earlier novels was named Chance). By inference and direct statement, Kosinski argues that people only make a bad situation worse by imagining that their lives have a purpose. Cruelty, Levanter muses, is magnified when those in authority "forget that their power is nothing more than a temporary camouflage of mortality." When a wealthy widow asks Levanter to marry her, he becomes frightened at the suggestion that the two of them can construct a fate for themselves: "A superstition lingered in him that if they did so chance might turn from a benefactor to the ultimate terrorist, punishing both of them for trying to control their own lives, trying to create a life plot."

Kosinski does not parade his pessimism; it lies in ambush throughout Blind Date. The novel's thrust--that life is a series of blind dates beyond human planning--will strike some as appalling and others as too simple by half. But the vitality and inventiveness that Kosinski crams into a dead end are as irresistible as ever. --Paul Gray

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