Stodgy Satire, Dodgy Satyr

Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish-born American novelist, is a curious phenomenon. After two very interesting and in many ways impressive early novels, The Painted Bird and Steps, Kosinski has become more successful and famous, has had more and more professorships, awards, TV appearances, and other honors and emoluments heaped on him, even as his later novels (mostly mere novellas) have become weaker and more strained. Thus, I imagine, Kosinski has a special affection for Chance, the hero of his novella Being There, which he has adapted faithfully, except for some expurgations, to the screen. For Chance is a naïf who keeps repeating the same inanities to a society that insists on reading profundities into them until he becomes rich and powerful and very probably the next President of the U.S.A. Kosinski himself has only made it as far as president of the PEN American Center up to now—but then, he is anything but a naïf.

Chance is an orphan who served as a gardener to a rich Washingtonian; he never left his employer’s house and high-walled garden, and spent his leisure time watching television. When the old man dies, Chance puts on one of the boss’s expensive suits and goes forth into the world. A very rich woman’s car slightly injures him, and the millionairess, Eve Rand, brings him to the palatial mansion she shares with her much older husband, Benjamin, a slowly dying reactionary tycoon, friend and advisor to the President, but a pretty decent fellow withal. Soon our almost completely feelingless simpleton—whose name and occupation, misheard, turn him into Chauncy Gardiner—becomes the confidant and guru of Benjamin, the counselor of the President, the semi-platonic lover of Eve (television having taught him only the earlier phases of lovemaking), the darling of TV talk shows, and the lion of Washington society. He ends up as heir to the dead Benjamin’s wealth and widow, and the likeliest candidate for the Presidency.

JS

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John Simon

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Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish-born American novelist, is a curious phenomenon. After two very interesting and in many ways impressive early novels, The Painted Bird and Steps, Kosinski has become more successful and famous, has had more and more professorships, awards, TV appearances, and other honors and emoluments heaped on him, even as his later novels (mostly mere novellas) have become weaker and more strained. Thus, I imagine, Kosinski has a special affection for Chance, the hero of his novella Being There, which he has adapted faithfully, except for some expurgations, to the screen. For Chance is a naïf who keeps repeating the same inanities to a society that insists on reading profundities into them until he becomes rich and powerful and very probably the next President of the U.S.A. Kosinski himself has only made it as far as president of the PEN American Center up to now—but then, he is anything but a naïf.

Chance is an orphan who served as a gardener to a rich Washingtonian; he never left his employer’s house and high-walled garden, and spent his leisure time watching television. When the old man dies, Chance puts on one of the boss’s expensive suits and goes forth into the world. A very rich woman’s car slightly injures him, and the millionairess, Eve Rand, brings him to the palatial mansion she shares with her much older husband, Benjamin, a slowly dying reactionary tycoon, friend and advisor to the President, but a pretty decent fellow withal. Soon our almost completely feelingless simpleton—whose name and occupation, misheard, turn him into Chauncy Gardiner—becomes the confidant and guru of Benjamin, the counselor of the President, the semi-platonic lover of Eve (television having taught him only the earlier phases of lovemaking), the darling of TV talk shows, and the lion of Washington society. He ends up as heir to the dead Benjamin’s wealth and widow, and the likeliest candidate for the Presidency.