Steps

I enjoyed Jerzy Kosinski's Being There (popularized by Peter Sellers and Hal Ashby) enough that I must have reflexively picked up another of his novels at the cat bookstore.  This one was less interesting to me.  Rather than a straightforward novel it is a series of vignettes related only by their dreamlike tone.  Like dreams, the themes are often overwrought -- violence, sex, deviance.  The writing, however, is anything but.  While I didn't find the content itself that compelling Kosinski's prose is a great study in how brevity can sometimes convey more, precisely because of its only sketchy and impressionistic connection to reality.