["Passion Play" gives] Kosinski the opportunity to engage in some virtuoso writing about sex and horsemanship, which is sometimes fun to read. He is very good at setting up the big scene, the sporting event, the spectacle…. But such scenes, more often than not, seem to intrude upon the narrative.

We know from the jacket copy and the Cervantes epigraph that we are in the presence of a modern knight-errant, and indeed the idea of a picaresque novel written by someone with Kosinski's skills has possibilities. But even in the opening scenes—Fabian's encounters with a female barber, a bunch of rowdy kids, a procurer of "foster daughters," a derelict—there is a leaden, arbitrary tone from which the book never recovers. (p. 18)

Ivan Gold, "Picaresque Sport," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1979 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), September 30, 1979, pp. 9, 18.