Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

So I've been working on my own derivative version of the Bechdel Test. It's been lurking in the back of my mind, as I've been reading older books by men. I'm sure someone else - probably a woman; men like me take a lot more obviousness to notice sexism than women do - has already created something similar, probably better. But this is where I've gotten to.

There are two kinds of books by men: those in which women are people, and those in which they're not. I don't claim to have made any complete survey of the literature, but the 20th century seems to be full of books of the second kind, which is somewhat disturbing. (My impression is that the 19th was largely the other way.)

This crystalized in my mind - after several Gene Wolfe books recently, among others - when reading the 1968 experimental novel Steps by Jerzy Kosinski, from what I'm coming to think of the core period where a whole lot of men just gave up entirely on the idea of "understanding women." (As if that was a coherent activity to begin with, that "women" were a single thing one could understand - that's part of the "not seeing them as people" idea I'm talking about.)

This isn't a novel of character anyway, so it might not be fair. But the man in Steps is a clear, precise, defined character - my guess, closely modeled on his author. So the fact that the women in it are all cyphers and sex objects and plot tokens is very noticeable. (They might all be supposed to be one woman, as the man is one man. But, since they're none of them defined enough to be anyone, that's a moot point.)

Steps is a novel by courtesy. It's barely long enough to qualify under most definitions - 148 pages in the edition I read. It has no named people in it. It has no consistent narrative or plot. It does have a first-person narrator, but it's not possible that the same person is the "I" of every single section. (For large clumps, here and there - yes.) But it is prose, it is fiction, it is published between two covers - ergo, we can call it a novel.

It's made up of many - dozens - of short sections, the vast majority of them narrated by a first-person narrator, doing different things in different places. They all seem to be mid-century - there's nothing historical - and are somewhat more European-flavored than American, though that's a minor point. It might all be supposed to be set in the same country, but it doesn't have to be. There is a Party that is important in this country, or one of the countries, and it is clearly Soviet in its flavor, postwar rather than the darker more brutal interwar era. (I note here that Kosinski was Polish, born in 1933, and that he emigrated to the USA in 1957, as a young man, and never returned.)

The sections are varied, but the man finds himself in dangerous or uncomfortable situations regularly. He has little power most of the time...though he generally has power over women.

It's the kind of book that gets called a "meditation" or "vision" - that's lit-speak for "nothing consistent." The reader has to assemble any larger meaning himself. 

I found the writing compelling, and the vision of this man interesting. But, at the same time, the focus on sex forced me to realize that the women, or woman, in Steps is not a person - just an element of the plot, or an idea, or a sketch of "woman" for rhetorical purposes. And I'm finding that less and less acceptable, the more I notice it. So that ended up being my major takeaway from Steps: that women are people, and that books should reflect that. It seems a minor point, but it's rarer than I would like.