[Passion Play] displays a familiar mixture: a protagonist whose life is a series of disconnected steps leading nowhere, women who are more vagina than mind, existential meditations, and explicitly described physical torture. This time, however, the hero rides higher than usual. (p. 52)

Kosinski's undeniable prowess as a scene-maker has never seemed more evident than in the exciting polo matches and seductions in these pages. Ironically, though, the power plays and love games all remain quite cheerless. The onset of middle age and the discovery of his need for love apart from Eros clearly separate Fabian from Tarden, Levanter, and the other Kosinski ciphers, traumas in search of appropriate catastrophes, who have strutted and fretted their ways through earlier novels. The deepest irony seems to be that in Passion Play the hero on horseback remains incapable of expressing true tenderness toward any other beings but his animals. A reader...