Don DeLillo

Cosmopolis

Jan Jackson

** 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.

Daryl Houston

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.

Bryan Alexander

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.

Juan Sacco

Lindsy Rice

Maic D

Vanda

Houssine Benboubker

jaymie b

Gavin

'A brilliant excursion into the decadence of contemporary culture' Sunday Times Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . . An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's Bonfire or Ellis's Psycho, Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized. 'A prose-poem about New York . . . DeLillo has always been good at telling us where we're heading . . . we ignore him at our peril' Blake Morrison, Guardian

Jesse Morley

edith w.

Fabiana

Charles Siboto

Denise La Greca

Manuel Colaci

Now a major motion picture directed by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson, Cosmopolis is the thirteenth novel by one of America’s most celebrated writers. It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism—when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments— are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. Today he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol’s funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors—experts on security, technology, currency, finance and a few sexual partners—as the limo sputters toward an increasingly uncertain future. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of the spectacular downfall of one man, and of an era.

Cosmopolis

Reviews