Where is Stephen (Steve) Poleskie Now?

Feckless John S_____ has escaped his father's used car lot in the Anthracite Region to pursue an acting career in New York City. Unable to wash dishes at Sardi's, much less dine there, he works as a part-time handyman on the Lower East Side--until fate casts him in a farce that plays like a tragedy. Answering a mysterious ad for a rent-free apartment, the John becomes ensnared in a plot to rig a Congressional election. A powerful corporation wants to run the not-too-threateningly handsome young actor as a spoiler.

At first, the masquerade merely bemuses John. He studies antique newsreels of Roosevelt and Churchill, takes elocution lessons to dilute a working-class regional accent, masters prepackaged evasions and clichés for press conferences, and learns to use his charming smile like a mouth guard. But as the cynicism becomes more sinister and his handlers act more and more like his jailers, John rebels and goes off script. When he campaigns in earnest and climbs the polls, the Powers that Be promise to fit John for some heavy boots. And they don't mean Timberlands.

A graphic artist and former barnstormer, Poleskie writes with a Goyaesque eye for the absurd and the grotesque and pilots a giddily aerobatic plot. But the novel works best as a "Pilgrim's Progress" of disillusionment. As our eternal innocent bumbles toward his martyrdom, we encounter a trio of allegorical characters: John's seedy salesman father, who seems a model of moral rectitude compared to the pols and flaks at campaign headquarters; R.A., John's boorish and ruthless campaign manager, who makes Karl Rove seem like Dennis Kucinich; and Pope Joan, the idealistic volunteer who becomes John's Beatrice but cannot save him from hell.

Commenting on the Weimar artist George Grosz, John Dos Passos observed: "A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at ugly and savage and incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible to get relief. He seeks to put into expressive forms his grisly obsessions the way a bacteriologist seeks to isolate a virus or a dangerous micro-organism. Looking at Grosz's drawings you are more likely to feel a grin of pain than to burst out laughing. Instead of letting you be the superior bystander laughing in an Olympian way at somebody absurd, Grosz makes you identify yourself with the sordid and pitiful object."

The same can be said of Stephen Poleskie's "The Third Candidate." Readers will laugh until they sob or sob until they laugh. Not that there's much difference in America anymore.