Being There

Jerzy Kosinski

Every few years I take in a dose of Kosinski, and his time rolled around again, and I chose "Being There." That the novel is disturbing should not be surprising giving Kosinski's body of work. What is surprising about this slender book is the way in which it is disturbing. There is no chilling, psychologically twisted character here. There is, equally, no brutality, of a sexual nature or otherwise. In fact, Chance, the main character, is indeed an innocent -- he has spent his entire life tending to a garden and otherwise confined to one room. He has only interacted with two other people in his entire life -- The Old Man, who took him in when he was just a child, and a maid in the house they live in. And those interactions were minimal at best. Everything that Chance knows about life he has learned by watching television. It is not Chance who is the disturbing factor of this book (however, the confinements under which he lived his life is certainly disturbing); as the story unfolds, we quickly realize that it is the society around Chance which is disturbed -- the society each and every one of us live in. And to the extent that the parable is true, it is a chilling view of ourselves that we see. Unfortunately, the book doesn't hold up the longer it goes on, and, in the end, it becomes a parody of itself more than a satire of society at large.

When the "old man" who took Chance in takes ill and dies, Chance is unceremoniously thrown out of the only home he's ever known. Wearing one of the old man's tailored suits, he leaves the house and is almost immediately struck by a limousine belonging to a rich society type, Elizabeth Eve Rand ("EE"). She takes him home to be evaluated by the doctors who are caring for her much older sick husband, and he ends up becoming their permanent house guest. As Chance, who is dubbed Chancey Gardner by EE, interacts with the household and its visitors, he relies heavily on the only thing he knows of human interactions -- what he's observed of them on tv. Whenever it is necessary to socialize, he recalls a similar situation he's seen on tv, and mimics. The only topic he ever talks about is gardening, as it is the only thing he knows. So, when he tells the President of the United States, who is visiting Mr. Rand, of the annual birth, death and rebirth of a garden, his statement is taken as a metaphor on the state of the economy, and suddenly a business man and financial advisor is born. Chauncey is hounded by the media, becoming a guest on news programs and interacting with chancellors and ambassadors at social functions. He continues his "metaphor" whenever he speaks, and he is deemed a brilliant by his observers. He has become a full blown celebrity.

That this simpleton becomes a celebrated business advisor, via the machinations of the media, is certainly a strong statement by Kosinksi on the shallow state of our society. And while the novel is disturbing in this regard -- and there's no escaping that it is -- I ultimately found it a bit repetitive, a bit shallow in its own development as a story. It's a wonderful premise and, probably, an important book. However, it begins to fall flat the longer it goes on, not finding any new ground to cover once its point is made. Still, a book that deserves a reading.