PARTISAN REVIEW
305
Reading
The Devil Tree
one is aware of those things that Kosinski
does with consummate skill: the mode that lies somewhere between
Kafka and our own sense of daily reality; the flat, underplayed, uncom–
prehending style; the use of a kind of narrative parataxis, all of those
short, unrelated bits of narrative, much of whose force lies in the art
with which they are detached from each other. "The auditorium grew
silent," one such section begins, "the lights dimmed; only one bright
spotlight followed the frail man who walked slowly towards the marble
podium. The all-male audience sat motionless, its gaze fixed upon him.
The man stumbled on one of the steep steps leading to the podium, but
promptly recovered his balance. No one moved."
It
is a unique fictional
method, so starkly inimitable that anyone who had ever read anything
by Kosinski would know who had written those lines. The narrative para–
taxis, moreover, is a marvelously expressive device for Kosinski's pur–
poses in
The Devil Tree:
wishing to show the rootlessness of his central
character, he is able to move him from Manhattan to Nepal without tran–
sition or modulation; wishing presumably to show the particular shallow–
ness of his quest for sensation, he is able to show unfulfilled sex,
unmotivated drug use, and unresolved encounter sessions by the rhythms
and omissions of his narrative segments.
Kosinski evidently intends for his novel to embody American myth
and American reality, American dreams and American limitations, which
means that
The Devil Tree
aims in a somewhat different direction from
Steps,
which locates all of its scarifying brutality in no particular place,
and
Being There,
which projects a fatuous extension of American power
without much attempt to place that movement in the solid texture of
American reality. What such a purpose requires is a certain consistency
of mode. Yet the book moves among a variety of modes: at one time it is
neopicaresque, the central figure a bemused invisible man in the world of
petty functionaries; at other times it seems a rather unfocused and old–
fashioned piece of satiric realism; and at .still other times it is cut loose
altogether from social fact, in a country of the mind like Kafka's
Amerika.
So it is that its import is diffuse, its ability to move the reader
is intermittent, its parts are better than its whole, and its voice is greater
than its vision.
William Burroughs's
Exterminator!
seeks quite deliberately to ex–
ploit a mixture of modes. Its styles shift, from a dull, low colloquial,
spliced together without punctuation ("You couldn't say exactly when it
hit familiar and dreary as a cigarette butt ground out in cold scrambled
eggs the tooth paste smears on a washstand glass why you were on the
cops day like another just feeling a little worse than usual which is not
unusual at all well an ugly thing broke out that day in the pre-
