What an awful, horrific, hater's book! Jerzy Kosinski, the author, must have had a bad year going to meet-and-grins in high society. Nobody is ok in this book. In Kosinski's bleak, black satire, he blasts away at civilized humanity, and at our poseur thinking selves (avatars is what I actually want to say). In truth, the hidden extreme self-involvement and the resulting recursive solipsism driving every single human being, in the author's opinion, is an ugly thing.

The book was written in 1971, but of course, it appears to reveal our current environment of politics and TV news scarily, exactly, resoundingly perfectly. Yikes. So much of what happens in this book seems to be actually happening right now. It feels like we are in a time where the spirit of Chance is holding on to the legs of our current politicians and Big Business CEOs.

I don't think some readers understand that Chance is a symbol of the inner self, not a reflection. Chance embodies what is dreadfully wrong with every character in the book except for The Old Man, who has the good sense to keep Chance as far away from him as he can. Chance isn't a real person. He is a monster. He's of the same type of creatures Dickens used in his book, 'A Christmas Carol', when Scrooge is visited by ghosts, in which one of the ghosts had attached to him creature children he called Want and Ignorance. Chance is a creature child attached to society and power in this monstrous fable.

Chance represents a miserable and devastating aspect of our natures that causes awful self-delusion and poverty of thought. The resulting harm of mistaking empty witless 'authenticity' for substance is terrifying.

By the way, the garden is another literary symbol turned on it's head as is everything in this book. Chance's garden is the Garden of Hell and the Tree of Ignorance.