THE DEVIL TREE by JERZY KOSINSKI 208 pages. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. $6.95.
Postulate a neurotic, hopeless main character, then spend 200 pages proving that the character is hopeless and neurotic. Occasionally a novelist succeeds with such an attenuation of the obvious. Joan Didion did, after a fashion, with Play It As It Lays. In this sour, stunted, perfunctory tale of a numbed rich boy, Jerzy Kosinski does not.
The novel's situation—it is too static to be called a plot—seems better suited to one of Harold Robbins' meat operas than to the work of a man who once won the National Book Award (for...
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