"Cosmopolis" depicts, from dawn to dawn, a single day in the life of one of Wall Street's self-anointed Masters of the Universe. Currency trader Eric Packer, forewarned with vague ("status urgent") rumors of assassins and threatened more ominously by his own crisis of faith, steps into his white limousine and decides that he wants to get a haircut on the other side of town. Within the miles of street life between the East and Hudson rivers, Eric is waylaid by several women (including his new wife, whom he barely knows), by pastry-throwing and rat-hurling attention seekers, by the lures of a quiet bookstore and a deafening techno-rave, by a choreographed riot bordering on street theater (or vice versa), by a funeral procession and a presidential visit, and by traffic--lots and lots of traffic.
On the one hand, I found myself completely sucked into the idea of Eric's journey: the mocking absurdity of his 24-hour trek from one side of midtown Manhattan to the other, simply to get a haircut and to find the meaning of life; the comic ludicrousness of his adventures; the unexpected and random brutality of the final chapters. There are scenes that stop just short of dazzling in their acidic humor, like Eric's proctology exam conducted inside the limousine while he faces his financial adviser, sweaty from her morning jog. And things become weirdly poignant (almost) when Eric whimsically joins his wife amidst dozens of nude extras lying on the street for the filming of a movie.
On the other hand, the novel seems to beg the reader for relevance; it's as if DeLillo went into a coma during the Sixties and, lately emerged, can't begin to comprehend the excess and the nonsense of modern America. Like the novel's billionaire protagonist waging his fortune against the rise of the yen, DeLillo bets that his readers will know virtually nothing about financial markets or how they work or who works them. As a result, the post-nihilistic, New Age dialogue is peppered with meaningless word clouds salvaged from a day's viewing of CNBC. "Don't trust standard models. Think outside the limits. The yen is making a statement. Read it. Then leap," says the Master to an analyst with "advanced degrees in mathematics and economics"--who for some reason doesn't slap Eric for insulting his intelligence (and ours). Stuff like this has neither the plausibility of market-talk nor the incisiveness of parody.
Eric Packer's self-constructed existence as a Master of the Universe is largely beside the point, anyway; the satire is so broad (capitalists and their hubris, youth and their short attention spans, technology and its impersonal ubiquity, the urban jungle and its hazards) that DeLillo might just as well have made his antihero an overpaid baseball player, a corrupt politician, or a music mogul--any of whom are far more likely to be caught dead in a white limousine in the first place. At the end of "Cosmopolis," we are, I suppose, expected to fathom the emptiness of Eric's life ("The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data"), but DeLillo has created not a man but a cipher that not even he, its creator, seems to understand.
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Printing is awful; pages are blurry and illegible
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2020
Ordered the book and was super excited to read it. When it came in there were huge sections of the book where the text was doubled and too blurry to read. I thought it was a one time issue and ordered a replacement, and it came in with the same issue again. I don’t know if their printer needs to be aligned but don’t buy it here. It’s a waste of money.
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2020
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H. M. Anderson
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Could have been worse.
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