by Jerzy Kosinski · 1970
Chance is a middle-aged gardener who has spent his entire sheltered life tending a wealthy man's Washington townhouse garden, his understanding of the world shaped almost entirely by what he watches on television. When his employer dies, Chance is turned out into the street for the first time, and a chance accident delivers him into the orbit of a dying industrialist and his politically connected wife. Mistaken for a man of cultured reticence and profound wisdom, his simple, literal remarks about gardening are read as sage metaphors on economics and politics, and he is swept upward through Washington society and the media toward the highest levels of power. The novel is a spare, deadpan satire of image, television, and the emptiness of public life.