Jerzy Kosinski takes on some new subject matter—polo, horsemanship and public sex—in his seventh novel, Passion Play, yet these things are not really his new territory. What he presents are the further psychological adventures of the Kosinski hero, who is now as recognizable as the Hemingway hero used to be. But what is genuinely new in Passion Play is that Kosinski's hero grows older; and we are treated to the continuing struggles of the boy from The Painted Bird who became the man from Steps, as he jousts quixotically with (as usual) women and death, loses some of his hair, and enters into a crisis of middle age and lost youth.

There is no nostalgia in this. That's not in Kosinski's emotional kitbag. But in the book's final pages, and particularly in its final image, which I will not reveal here, there is an earned poignancy...