There’s just no getting around the fact that Jerzy Kosinski was a toad. James Park Sloan’s new biography, Jerzy Kosinski (Dutton, 505 pages, $ 27.95), is as fair an account of the Polish-American novelist as we are likely to get, and Kosinski still comes off as a liar, a cheat, and a world-class social climber.

He had charm, of course, as nearly everyone who ever met him testifies, the dangerous charm of the kind of man to whom the unpredictable always seems to happen, whose conspiratorial grin promises that, any moment now, things are going to get seriously crazy. But the only real question remaining about Kosinski is whether his books, and the fact that he was an anti-Communist in the days when it was still unfashionable in his hip New York literary crowd, are enough of a reason to salvage his reputation from the pit where it has lain since his suicide in 1991.