Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
Published 1970 · 30,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire
How hard is Being There to read?
Being There scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Deliberately plain diction that mirrors Chance's vocabulary; the only elevated language belongs to the financiers and diplomats who misread him.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Short, flat declarative sentences with almost no subordination, a style Kosinski chose to keep the surface featureless.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- Everything is scene and dialogue, but the whole apparatus is built to carry an argument about how meaning gets projected onto blankness.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- A short book with a small cast, minimal exposition, and no technical demands on the reader.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- The narration stays inside a mind that understands nothing, so the reader must assemble the political comedy from what Chance cannot register.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The garden, the television screen, and the closing walk across water build an allegory of the empty vessel mistaken for a sage.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- Every line of praise for Chauncey Gardiner's wisdom is an indictment of the person praising him; the gap between what is said and what is meant never closes.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- The last page floats Chance toward the vice presidency and leaves the question of whether anything at all is inside him unanswered.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- Strictly linear, short numbered chapters, one point of view throughout.
How Being There is regarded
Being There holds a literary regard score of 60 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.