Cosmopolis

Don DeLillo has avid fans who adore the humor, symbolism, and neo-Gothic fantasy of Underworld and his other novels. In this one, a youngish tycoon enters his custom-made limo to traverse Manhattan for a haircut. The journey takes him an entire day, becoming an odyssey of erotic and satiric adventures, ending with a confrontation with his would-be assassin. Echoes of Joyce, Cheever, and Tom Robbins abound. Will Patton lowers his rugged voice to a near whisper, imbuing the entire exercise with a sinister presentiment of doom. In so doing, much of the humor is sacrificed. The combination of murky text and mumbling reader makes the novel difficult to concentrate on. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

November 11, 2002
A starred or boxed review indicates a book of outstanding quality. A review with a blue-tinted title indicates a book of exceptional importance that hasn't received a starred or boxed review. COSMOPOLIS Don DeLillo. Scribner, $25 (224p) ISBN 0-7432-4424-9 DeLillo skates through a day in the life of a brilliant and precocious New Economy billionaire in this monotone 13th novel, a study in big money and affectlessness. As one character remarks, 28-year-old Eric Packer "wants to be one civilization ahead of this one." But on an April day in the year 2000, Eric's fortune and life fall apart. The story tracks him as he traverses Manhattan in his stretch limo. His goal: a haircut at Anthony's, his father's old barber. But on this day his driver has to navigate a presidential visit, an attack by anarchists and a rapper's funeral. Meanwhile, the yen is mounting, destroying Eric's bet against it. The catastrophe liberates Eric's destructive instinct—he shoots another character and increases his bet. Mostly, the action consists of sequences in the back of the limo (where he stages meetings with his doctor, various corporate officers and a New Economy guru) interrupted by various pit stops. He lunches with his wife of 22 days, Elise Shifrin. He has sex with two women, his art consultant and a bodyguard. He is hit in the face with a pie by a protester. He knows he is being stalked, and the novel stages a final convergence between the ex-tycoon and his stalker. DeLillo practically invented the predominant vernacular of the late '90s (the irony, the close reading of consumer goods, the mock complexity of technobabble) in White Noise, but he seems surprisingly disengaged here. His spotlighted New Economy icon, Eric, doesn't work, either as a genius financier (he is all about gadgetry, not exchange—there's no love of the deal in his "frozen heart") or a thinker. The threats posed by the contingencies that he faces cannot lever him out of his recalcitrant one-dimensionality. DeLillo is surely an American master, but this time out, he is doodling.

The events in this short novel occur in a single day, as 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer is driven across New York City to get a haircut. In dryly precise prose, DeLillo portrays his main character as an amoral, self-absorbed, and eternally bored genius. Packer makes several stops during his tonsorial mission--to have sex, meet his wife, attend a funeral for a rap star, and finally to meet the man who wants to kill him. Richard Poe's narration is slow paced, and his rich voice nicely conveys Packer's ennui. (Another narrator, Richard Ferrone, takes over when the novel briefly switches point of view.) Poe, like DeLillo himself, manages to sound dispassionate without being cold. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine