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Like Kosinski's "Steps", and to some extent like "Being There", the voice in "Blind Date" is detached and matter-of-fact, even when describing the most intense emotions and the most awful events. That quality of the voice is what strikes me most about the book, for whatever reason.
The writing is flawless and limpid, the characters and events well constructed; I'm left with the feeling that the book is exactly what Kosinski intended it to be. There is good and especially evil here, a certain menace or depravity always lurking under the surface even in the most innocent events, even when nothing untoward actually happens. This is the story of a life, not a life that makes any kind of sense and not necessarily an admirable life, not necessarily a realistic life even, but a life worth reading.
And I have to qualify that "not necessarily a realistic life" by mentioning that a couple of the more extreme and capricious events are in fact autobiographical, are things that happened to Kosinski himself; he had quite a life. So to some extent this is an autobiographical work. But if that includes the rape and the vigilante assassinations, I'm not sure I want to know about it.
This could be almost be read as a straightforward sexy hardboiled adventure story. Or perhaps a parody of one, or a tribute to the genre, by a skilled writer playing with the limits. But it's certainly more than that, in ways that are hard to describe.
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