** spoiler alert ** Excellent. Much more bleak than ‘American Psycho’ (AP’s redeeming feature was its dark comedy...) but engaging and stimulating. Which is what I like in a novel. The central character - a financial guru who understands the mythology and nuance of currency markets, and has everything that money can buy - is bought up sharp by the failure of the market to comply with his view. In so doing, he loses his self, his confidence in his skills, and the thin ice that separates him from the everyday. All he can focus on is his need for a haircut. So begins his journey - and the authors hymn - to New York, as it is laid before us in all its strangeness and mundanity. His new wife pops in and out, more comfortable with the city than him. In the stuttering journey across town, Death stalks him, and he realises his mortality. Trouble is, he’s too far along the road... One of the best books I’ve read in a while. It’s dedicated to Paul Auster, and you can see why.

It was ok, kind of oddly hyper-masculine and in some ways cliche, the worst of which is the sort of stuff that drove me away from DeLillo years ago.

It's hard to write about this book without being influenced by its style. I'm tempted to write in short, cryptic sentences, and aim for coolness. Cosmopolis is a short novel about a billionaire financier. It takes place over 24 hours, charting the character's decline and fall as he wanders through NYC. If you haven't read DeLillo, you'll probably be struck by the style. Characters speak strangely, shifting topics between sentences, lurching from comedy to lyric. The prose does something similar, dropping in details which seem random, but which might (or might not) prove useful later on. The plot, such as it is, doesn't move much. (view spoiler)[ Eric Packer has a series of conversations, and a lot of sex. His financial empire rapidly disintegrates. Various people attack his limo. Packer has a haircut and demolishes his wife's fortune. Packer kills his bodyguard, then shoots himself and presumably dies. (hide spoiler)] But there isn't much urgency. This isn't an action novel. Packer is the focus, which might depress some readers. He's an egomaniac, obsessed with data and patterns, casually and deliberately cruel, and sex-happy. He's a Wall Street icon, but too eccentric to be one of the leading 1% there; instead Packer is like a quant risen to imperial heights. He's not a pleasant man to accompany for 24 hours and 209 pages. Not is he funny, as the satire is a minor theme. But the language is a delight. It's a treat to watch DeLillo look at the world and minutely dissect it. That world is New York City, and I enjoyed returning to it through Cosmopolis. Some readers find the style and the narrator to be unpleasantly chilly; this is not a problem for me. It's also a work of historical fiction. A subtitle or intertitle proclaims THE YEAR 2000, and as that year recedes Cosmopolis serves as a fine period piece of the bubble years, the run-up to the 2008 crash. Indeed, Packer's career could be a nice microcosm of that arc. We see anti-globalization protestors, immigrants from countries newly represented in the American scenes (the Balkans, subSaharan Africa), the rise of big data, the triumph of financialization, mobile computing, and the surveillance state. Recommended, if you want to get into the DeLillo headspace, or look back at the runup to the Great Recession. PS: I haven't seen the Cronenberg movie, but I'd very much like to.