BEING THERE -- Worth Another Read

Jerzy Kosinski first published Being There in 1970. It's the story of a kept man secreted away in a garden for all of his 30 or 35 years, his only window on the world a prized television and his only contacts with it the few house keepers and maintenance folks who show up at the house of his aging keeper over his guarded lifetime. He does not know his mother or father, though one might believe it is the keeper, the "Old Man", who is his father, who wants to keep the boy a secret, but still well treated and cared for.

Schooled only by what he sees on television, and an occasional lesson from the household staff members, he spends his time between the garden, where he cares for and nourishes -- and is in turn cared for and nourished by -- the trees, shrubs and flowers growing in the cloistered plot, and the bedroom where he receives his three squares a day, and which houses his TV set. The garden is surrounded by a high brick wall that divides its inhabitant from the very real world outside, heard but not seen except as portrayed through television.

When the master dies and the house is shuttered, the man -- whose name is Chance -- is without provenance. He is put into the streets with no identification, nothing to link him to the world or his untraceable past but a suitcase filled with the master's fine clothes. He is, indeed, a stranger in an even stranger land, a land to which he can only relate by recalling and reenacting scenes from the many television shows he's watched over the span of a lifetime.

A series of unlikely events leads him into the household of a well connected businessman and his younger and lively wife. Koskinski's characterization of the wealthy couple and the way they proceed on their quickly drawn false assumptions is a fitting stereotype of the know-it-all-ness of the American aristocracy. In this case a couple who have nary a clue as to where Chances comes from, or what his sheltered life has been like prior to their meeting. His simple solutions to complex questions, which he draws from the life of plants (the only life he knows), appear to audiences as metaphors for life in all its forms. A zen-like understanding of the seasons makes him an overnight celebrity called upon to solve -- or at least explain away -- the world's problems.

These problems include a global economy in a tailspin, a political structure struggling to instill the kind of optimism in people that will last them through their doldrums, and political divisions perpetuated by cynicism and suspicion. Nearly forty years later, the story holds strong. For the writing and for the alacrity therein, Being There is worth going back to for another read.

100 pp, Grove Press isbn 0-0821-3634-6