Customer Reviews

Pinball

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It is really too bad that some reviewers missed so much of what was going on in this novel. It is NOT about rock and roll. It
IS about the conflict between the disposable pop culture which
is America's primary export to the world and the "high" culture
of the old world which is aimed primarily at the intellectual elite. It is also about the areas in which these two cultures
cross, as well as clash.
Cultural conflict abounds everywhere in this novel. Consider
that Domostroy, the classical composer who is one main character here was the name of a marriage manual formerly given to brides
in the Russian Orthodox Church. The "Domostroy" described a
wife's duties to her husband, and the punishments she could expect from him if she failed in her wifely duties. Consider that Andrea, Domostroy's lover, is the very model of an '80's
American feminist, and you begin to understand some of what is going on here symbolicly. The mysterious Godard character can
be seen as an analog for God, film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, as well as former Columbia Records executive Godard Lieberson, also
a classical composer. The introduction of the Claudia character,
a young piano virtuoso whose specialty is Chopin, brings suggestions of the sado-masochistic aspects of the love affair of Chopin with George Sand to bear on the relationship between
Domostroy and Andrea.
Obviously, most Americans DO NOT talk like the characters in this novel. They lack the education. This is not so much a story, as a novel of ideas, and those ideas are as bold and
fascinating as their interplay is complex and bewildering.
Is the entire novel an exercise in cultural snobbism? Read it
and decide for yourself.

Several reviewers, showing no reverence, appear not to have heard that Jerzy took his own life some years ago. PINBALL may have been Jerzy's best effort. He inserts layer after layer of the pinball metaphor, a ball bounced hither and fro, mostly by chance. He compares the unexpected motion of a pinball to the music of his hero, Domostroy. These elements of chance plague all his characters. The unexpected, unforeseen, unpredictable falling of the pinball is a metaphor for the sudden cessation of life.

The shadow of death permeates this story. The character Goddard is panicked by the sudden death of a girl he picked up by chance. To him it was as if a phonograph had suddenly been unplugged. The music, ever a metaphor for life, just stopped. What meaning can there be in a life so casually turned off? This anticipation of death was much worse than death itself. Kosinski saw the grim reaper as the ultimate controller of all life.

The rise and fall of Domostroy's career in music was another layer of the pinball metaphor. The search for the composer's inspiration always led to female embedded sex. All love was unrequited. In fact, music itself was presented as the joining of male and female notes. The characters were all presented as puppets whose strings were being pulled by the puppeteer called Music.

Kosinski used the two characters, Domostroy and Goddard, to show the toll that celebrity had inflicted on his own life. The question is, can an artist separate himself from his works once he chooses to exhibit them? Goddard had hoped to avoid the fate of John Lennon by constructing a dream world where he remained anonymous. While Domostroy chose to live in a cell of his own making to avoid the consequences of his own failed music and his own pinballed life.

The novel is flawed in many ways. The violent climax at the end was a little too predictable, and the conversations at times sounded more like lectures from some music professor desperately trying to be hip, or like an author trying to recreate the casual banter of people from subcultures he never experienced.

However the books true saving grace (apart from some really interesting information here and there) was the very idea of a famous rock musician who has no public persona. Anonymity as a means of generating "hype" - and hiding from the world and protecting one's "real" life. The concept is fascinating.

PINBALL is a surreal, intense meditation on the relationship of art to the artists that produce it, and the relationship of artists to their audience.

Reportedly written in response to JohnLennon's assassination, PINBALL is the story of an obsessive fan's search for the world's most popular rock star, the mysterious Goddard. Goddard does not perform in public; no one has ever seen him, no one knows who he really is. Andrea, the obsessed fan, seduces has-been classical pianist Patrick Domostroy to help her in the search. As the search develops, Domostroy wonders about its true motivation, and begins to understand that the revelation will inevitably be a disappointment. It's the art that matters, not the artist -- but he does not know what Andrea has planned for Goddard once she finds him.

Occasionally overwritten and melodramatic, PINBALLnevertheless exerts an almost hypnotic spell on a first-time reader. Domostroy's search takes him from sex clubs to society parties, all of which are acutely observed, as is the character of Domostroy himself.

Domostroy is the novel's most fully developed character; others appear more as archetypes than as real people. This is only appropriate, however, when one considers PINBALL as an allegory, a fable similar to the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs. PINBALL repays multiple readings, and lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned.

This book is about music and sex. The observations about music are interesting (to a musical neophyte like me), but the sexual content is dated, clunky, embarassing. Overall, the book is little better than the usual trashy bestseller with none of the skill and insight of Steps or Being There.

A cartoonish and predictable novel that will especially disappoint fans of Kosinski's purer, more original efforts.

Pinball starts off promising enough but quickly descends into a boring, two-dimensional mess. Kosinski does little to make his characters seem sympathetic or interesting, it isn't long before you stop caring what happens to this pack of stiffs. The dialog is improbable, Kosinski seems to have a habit of delivering exposition through his characters' mouths, making them speak in bizarre, overly academic patterns and delivering background knowledge to the reader with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The story only gets resolved through impossible coincidences and characters making the wildest, strangest jumps to conclusions which conveniently happen to be correct. Also helping to shatter Kosinski's illusion is his lack of understanding of rock music and the dynamics of the personalities around it. (A performer in the beauty- and personality-based rock culture manages to dominate the charts and even have dance clubs dedicated to his music without ever playing live, showing his face in public or even identifying himself to his record label? A punk rock star who becomes reviled by his former fans for his escapades with sex and drugs? Has Kosinski ever heard of Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop or Lou Reed?) In short, I've read better stories on the back of breakfast cereal boxes. The imaginary world of Pinball is shallow and unconvincing and is best skipped.

Reading the reviews for Pinball thus far, there seems to be a determination either to dismiss the work entirely or attribute to it more weight than it deserves.

It helps to know that at the time of Pinball's publication, Kosinski's star in the literary landscape had either already been, or was about to be, pummeled by a scathing expose in The Village Voice that revealed Kosinski as a sociopathic liar and that his three most celebrated works were written by ghostwriters or were plagiarized from lesser known Polish novelists. This was a particularly scathing indictment since Kosinski had gained a great deal of notoriety for writing The Painted Bird which many heralded as an autobiographical account of the author's childhood in Poland during Nazi occupation. Kosinski invited his own downfall because, while he never explicitly stated that his most celebrated book was autobiographical, he either implied it or, at least, never went out of his way to say that it wasn't.

Nevertheless, when the Village Voice article came out, the understandable backlash from critics, not to mention genuine Holocaust survivors, pretty much decimated an already faltering writing career by the early 80s. Which is where Pinball seems to depart.

When one reads a significant body of Kosinski's works, one can see that Kosinski's own (need?) (desire?) (habit?) to glamorize or comment on his own life was an all-consuming practice. Patrick Domostroy's identity is transparently Kosinski. (National Music Award for Octaves; National Book Award for Steps.)

Pinball could almost be the one true autobiographical statement that Kosinski ever made about the trajectory of his professional career. In a sense, its all little more than self-pity and naval gazing - the pop star Goddard being a cipher for Kosinski's celebrated life as literary darling that no one knew as opposed to Domostroy's faded star and mundane life that became Kosinski's life when his later works didn't sell that well and he was no longer that "bright star."

Of course, always in Kosinski's works there is the theme of "chance" - the "you never know what's going to happen next stuff" that was so celebrated as a theme in "Being There" and which also served as a comment on the demise of his career and reputation represented by the Pinball as the last telling image.

Its not nearly as shallow a work as many of Kosinski's detractors would have you believe (Obviously the world he describes stretches credibility because of the anonymity of Goddard is flat impossible in a media saturated world. But the intent is not to portray a realistic world anyway, so I reject most criticisms on that level.) But it isn't nearly as deep as his defenders want to be. As a fan of Kosinski's works, despite the controversy, the novel is a fascinating study. Unlike many authors, Kosinski puts himself (or his invention of himself) right at the center of his novel's world.

Kosinski has the bad habit of 'Telling' instead of 'Showing'.
Instead of the characters voices we get the narrator telling us what is said. Whole conversations are told instead of letting the reader hear the characters and let them live on their own. This got to be way to much for me and although the premise is cool and it ends on a good note (why hasn't this been made into a movie?) the book suffers from a bad case of overwriting.

Slow start describes less than fascinating has-been of a serious composer. The build up of Godard, the rock star wunderkind, is more fascinating than the flesh and blood man one meets in the heart of the novel. Denouement disappoints with its violence and destruction. Tawdriness of the sex underground not for the squeemish and clashes with the general art and music theme of the main body. Nevertheless, from midbook to the end, it becomes a page turner.