Steps
by Jerzy Kosiński
Summary
Steps has no plot, no names and no fixed country. It is a sequence of several dozen short episodes, some a paragraph, some a few pages, narrated by a young man who may or may not be the same young man throughout, moving between a poor collectivised Eastern Europe and an anonymous West, interleaved with fragments of dialogue between a man and a woman negotiating, in flat abstract language, the terms of their intimacy.
The episodes themselves are appalling and exact: village cruelties observed and joined, humiliations administered and received, seductions conducted as reconnaissance, revenges of disproportionate patience, the machinery of party, army, office and hospital experienced as a series of traps in which the only dignity is a cold interior withdrawal. Kosiński writes it all in a prose scraped entirely clean, no comment, no psychology, no visible author, and the accumulating effect is of a intelligence that has concluded that power is the only real subject and detachment the only real defence, and is showing you, without ever saying so, how it got that way.
It is a short book with a long afterlife, remembered usually against the reader's will. What it is not is entertainment; the sexual and violent material is administered with the same anaesthetised calm as everything else, which is precisely what makes it disturbing.
Around one hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want to see how much fiction can strip away and still function, and who take the content warning in this description at face value.
Historical Context & Significance
Steps won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1969. Hugh Kenner reached for Kafka and Céline; decades later David Foster Wallace called it unbelievably creepy and said only Kafka's fragments go near it, and the book's cult standing has always been of exactly that kind, transmitted between writers like contraband.
Its afterlife includes American publishing's most famous sting: in 1975 the freelance writer Chuck Ross sent excerpts of the novel to four publishers under a pseudonym, all rejected, and in 1977 sent the complete book to ten publishers, including Random House, which had originally published it, and thirteen literary agents, none of whom recognized a National Book Award winner.
Then the author himself became the controversy. A 1982 Village Voice investigation alleged that Jerzy Kosiński's books depended on uncredited assistants and translators, charges he denied and his defenders fought, but the damage held; his invented autobiography unravelled alongside, and in 1991, ill and besieged, he killed himself. Steps, the least assisted looking book imaginable, sits at the center of the argument his life became.