Passion Play

This book rocked. It was highly sexy, visceral, corporeal, and struggling, as well as classy, heartfelt, and with taste. I don't know anything about polo, but the world portrayed in this book was exclusive and enviable. Not that many people can afford horses and the company of some of the richest people, and while we can certainly feel sympathy for the main character, Fabian, we also can take a step back and realize that while he ages, loses many loves, and cannot form lasting relationships with almost anybody, he has had all the tragedy and drama that anyone could ask for, having experienced a life full of passion and meaning, whether that meaning was contrived from motives of pride or not. Okay, perhaps the point is that his life was pitiable. If his every significant action was intended to make his life all the more dramatic and sweeping in scope and audacity, then he really was going out on a limb this whole time, all the more reason for him to mourn his own aging; he can't keep up with his own lifestyle any more. His sex with young women, some underage, might evoke in some readers a repulsion. I am a straight male in my 20s who, while in a monogamous relationship and a relatively law-abiding citizen, can appreciate the fact that sex with underage girls (or boys) is biologically sound. There's the argument that it's wrong because it's taking advantage, etc. But I think there are some who condemn these relationships out of jealousy. 20 something men and women could be jealous of a relationship between a 50 or 60 something man and a teenage girl. The 20 somethings are bypassed entirely, their ripe youth bypassed for the unripe love that will be absorbed by the long past due. But Fabian's justification would seem to be that he teaches his girls how to love, how to be free in their bodies, how to see the world around them as a source of pleasure, not as a maze of meaningless social chitchat. The bold world of polo accounted for in the first third of the book is fascinating for someone like me who can rarely see a horse up close, let alone a game like polo. The brutality of the death of his friend Eugene, the bitter hatred that Alexandra arouses, the way the husband of a woman he was eyeing was assassinated by tarantula placement, the event making him suspect if he tells. The sad twisted behavior of the poor chubby girl whose Japanese foster parents left her, her begging for Fabian's company, and then her suicide. The dark moments this book contains . . . And these moments all revolve around horses, these huge, majestic animals whose power can be scary. As Fabian says, they're powerful, but they're not as smart as cats, or as loyal as dogs. They are the ultimate force to be reigned in. If you're a horse person and these observations seem to you to be far off the mark, well too bad. Did you ever think you may be only one person with an opinion? Playing polo doesn't make one a judge over imaginary polo practices. Sure he can play polo on the

That is, if you can forget about the polo mistakes Kosinski or his ghost writers made. After all, polo is an abstruse sport, filled with arcane rules few understand. The rest of us can enjoy the novel for what it is, a fairly difficult novel about rootlessness and exile in 20th Century America. The hero, Fabian, takes his name from the socialist society of turn of the century England, and uses a trailer to transport himself and his animal across the nation. It's his "little home on wheels," as he calls it. Fabian is a suitable symbol for our deracinated society, in which nobody really has a home because of the topsy-turvy state of the planet. As for the (numerous) sex scenes, Kosinski does a great job at making us care for the emotions behind the sex acts, not just the bodies, but the hearts and minds of his players. The book is called "Passion Play" not just because of the polo scenes, but because in this book JK hoped to expose the open nerves of his hero with the precision of a master surgeon, each vein and ambition caught and held deftly by a scalpel of precise imagery and language. Who would have thought that he didn't know how to speak a word of English until age eight? Play on, "PASSION PLAY."