Cosmopolis: A Novel

Walter Benjamin has said that a critique of a work of art is about the truth of the work. A commentary is about the content of the work of art. Unfortunately almost all of these reviews of Cosmopolis are commentary reviews about its content. To fully understand-not necessarily enjoy-this book one needs to be familiar with the work of Jean Baudrillard. Read Cosmopolis through Baudrillard and it will become a shining star for you. It is brilliant, contemporary and now that Cronenberg is filming it with his own screenplay in cooperation with De Lillo, maybe its meaning will leak into the thickest of its readers' minds. I'm not necessarily optimistic though after reading three pages of reviews before I screamed in silence and quit.

Only 10 pages had turned before the gorgonzola was rolling around in my gob again, three years since it went in, and I pondered how the only thing worse than reading James Joyce is reading other writers trying to write like James Joyce.
On one April day in 2000 I sat in Davy Byrne's pub on Dublin's Duke Street, sharing a gorgonzola sandwich with the ghost of Leopold Bloom and chasing Joyce's "ineluctable modality of the visible," which was invisible. Perhaps it was the Liffey fog or the Guinness. And, by the hazy way, I was proudly becoming one of only 74 people worldwide who have actually finished "Ulysses," an experimental story based on an ancient story.
Don DeLillo is apparently another. His new odyssey-come-lately, "Cosmopolis," is an ode to Joyce in a new key, but an old cant. It resonates with the same disjunctive, unsettling rhythm of Joyce's 1922 novel, but lacks the texture, orality and genuine humanity. But take heart: It's easier to read -- DeLillo is a consummate master of poetic language -- and it's shorter by hundreds of pages.
DeLillo's cast of characters rivals Joyce's, too. Packer's day begins when he bumps into his newlywed bride of 22 days, an aloof poet-heiress, in traffic. He continues his odyssey with various paramours and business advisers (and sometimes the line between them is very vague, indeed), a doctor who examines his asymmetrical prostate in the backseat of the limo, his stump-necked security chief who worries an assassin lurks around every corner and ... well, an assassin lurking around the corner.
Compare and contrast: Joyce's hero, advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, sets out across Dublin on a June day in 1904, a deliberate spoof of mythology wrapped in social realism.
"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries," James Joyce once crowed about "Ulysses." That didn't stop Aldous Huxley from calling it "one of the dullest books ever written." One college English professor described his time with "Ulysses" this way: "It was like having a rib ripped out of my body, being beaten with it, raped with it, and then being forced to eat it."
So why regurgitate this book based upon the most familiar story in human history, Homer's Odyssey? While it helps to know the Joyce's "Ulysses" was intended to be a comedy -- albeit a "comedy" only in the tragic Irish sense of the word -- it is one of the most famous books never read.
Comes now Don DeLillo, a National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner winner, with his redux of a redux of an endlessly redone original. DeLillo is no Joyce, which is probably good. He's also no Vonnegut, whose four- and five-dimensional characters are far more engaging and intimate as they traverse similar parallel universes.
DeLillo is pushing the hidebound limits of commercial fiction in 2003 much the same as Joyce did 80 years ago. For that, he deserves praise. "Cosmopolis" is nothing if not challenging, thought-provoking and utterly different. One hopes DeLillo wrote it as a comedy, too.
But there is simply no single significant character who engages the reader. Every one is emotionally armored, self-absorbed, insane or seemingly incapable of redemption. Packer is promiscuous, greedy, selfish, brusque, dishonest and cold -- and those are his good qualities.
On the other hand, if you are among the other 73 readers, besides me, who actually survived Joyce's "Ulysses," you will grasp the far deeper contexts and mysteries of "Cosmopolis" than the poor mope who finds it under "Foreign Exchange Markets" in the library card file and thinks it's an international money thriller.

Have been traveling allot lately (thus the light postings). I was in Portland three weeks ago and met my brother for coffee at <a href="[...]">Powells</a>. Powells is literally a candy store for the book owner. Sprawling now over more than one square city block, you are handed a map to the sections when you walk in. Just on my way through the technical section to the coffee shop, I picked up five books. Unfortunately I should have figured out from the $5.98 sales price on Cosmopolis (regularly $13.00) that something was fishy. Even though it was in the "staff recommendations" section. I keep forgetting that many times what the staff of a bookstore like Powells likes is somewhat like what indie film fanatics like in movies. Quirky, off beat tomes that appeal to a very limited audience.

That is Cosmopolis in spades. I don't know the person who recommended it, but I bet he/she only wears black, lives in shared housing with other tortured souls and fancies themselves "alternative". I like many alternative things. Many times the best ideas come from the fringes. In Cosmopolis's case though, only dull insipid self serving slop is served up though. I made it to page 89 before giving up for a total lack of interest. Completely uninteresting characters, poor structure, and no obvious point. By half way through a "novel" (a stretch at 200 pages paperback) you should at least CARE what the hell happens to the characters. The depth of my apathy was so deep that I almost left the book in the hotel this morning. But then I thought the world deserved to know how pathetic this drivel was. If my sacrifice of a couple hours can save even one soul the torture (and lost money) of this waste of natural resources then I might get back some of the karma this thing sucked away.

The Martin Tobias rating of 1-5, this gets a ZERO. Run away.

I bought this book while on vacation in Italy - it was the only novel in English by a literary type author in the bookstore. I knew De Lillo was supposed to be a great author and so I bought it. Also, I am interested in reading about financial figures like George Soros or Warren Buffet.

The book reminds me of the movie Apocalypse Now which starts wonderfully with great cinematography and eventually descends into craziness and nonsense IMHO. This book starts well with a high concept and great writing style and then gradually descends into implausibility, nonsense etc. The financial transactions didn't seem very plausible to me and the motivation didn't make sense any more and the events at the end of the day involved far too much coincidence to be plausible.

Unless of course the latter parts of the day are all meant to be some psychotic episode.

Summary
This is rich cake with no flavor, like biting into a cheesecake and tasting all the butter.

Thoughts
DeLillo's classic prose style is fully active within this novel, and one can appreciate the thought and energy that are active on every line. However, the substance of the work is unremarkable, and the developments of the story are easily forgettable. One week after reading it, I am already at a loss to recreate the plot in my mind. What remains are only echoes of the work's *brilliant* tidbits of analysis on the interrelations between power, technology and wealth. There are features of this book that are certainly gourmet reading, but the story itself is unexceptional.

The dismissive reviews I read of Cosmopolis made me hesitate to buy it. After reading a library copy, I bought Cosmopolis to read a second time. I figure buying the book is the best vote cast in its favor.
Cosmopolis is not a facile entertainment. It requires work on the reader's part. Delillo is exploring territory that, by its nature, eludes description. The mind has well-evolved strategies for perceiving and reacting to the world; non-rational strategies largely inaccessible to waking consciousness; strategies that worked for millennia, now effectively shunted aside and concealed from view - even while they operate continuously in clandestine ways. How do you view or talk about this hidden stuff? You can't name it because language by nature is rational and this, by its nature, is not.
Delillo gives us a metaphor. Cosmopolis. It is incongruous. It doesn't match our world or its usual fictionalized portraits. The reader tries to fit the world s/he knows with the metaphor - it can't be done, it's incongruous. But in trying, the reader starts to sense an opening into something that is neither our world nor its metaphor Cosmopolis, something rising out of the tension between them.
The book is an exploration into the tension between the normal surface of things and an animating underworld we know is there but hardly know. Reading, rereading Cosmopolis, thinking about it is like opening a door in the mind that leads to rooms not often visited.

Like many of DeLillo's novels, Cosmopolis is characterized by incisive, playful prose, a taut plot arc and a host of well-put questions about the postmodern condition. The story of capital-magnate Eric Packer's simultaneous demise and ascent (depending on whom you ask) is presented as sleekly as the notably allegorical uber-limousine that provides much of the novel's setting. Its exploration of the theme of isolation amid the crowd of Manhattan is perhaps the most poignant written since Melville's "Bartelby, Scribner."
If there's a downside to the novel, it's that Cosmopolis falls prey to the Kundera Syndrome: its players have a tendency to wax philosophical with a frequency and intensity that becomes somewhat grating. Much as DeLillo's thinking is engaging and topical, it's a little much at times and, worse, tends to detract from some of the moments of poignant surreality by cerebralizing them, shifting them from fascinatingly visceral aberrations to intellectual playthings.

Cosmopolis in years to come will be regarded as one of the shining lights of the DeLillo ouvre. This great American writer since the early 70's in his aptly named debut, Americana, has been telling us all what these United States of America is becoming - a country so awash in materialism and the false herald of the religious right that its people cannot understand any mock satiric of its way of life. The the store reviews of Cosmopolis reflect this sad fact. Let's make millions on the stretch limo drive to get a haircut. All is vanity in this the ultimate tale of greed.

I enjoyed Libra-- or remember enjoying it. I enjoyed the idea behind The Players and some of his other devices-- the Hitler porno tape in one of his other novels. Though I haven't been lured into Underworld (nor will I after reading Cosmopolis), I had always respected what De Lillo was trying to do. The vague here-thereness, the disturbing clipped descriptions, the flat menace made all the more menacing for its ordinariness...great stuff!
Until I began flipping through Cosmopolis.
Sigh.
When you dispense with a meaningful plot or characterization and settle solely for atmosphere and dialogue, you've created at best the literary equivalent of white noise--his own creation. De Lillo has become one of those Important Authors that no longer has to entertain or enlighten or anything. He's reached the logical end of his journey as a Post-Modernist author and as such created a work that is...what? An ennervated American Pyscho? A Bonfire of the Vanities for those afflicted with ADD?
Skip this bigtime.

CAVEAT:

My FIRST Don deLillo book (and CERTAINLY my last!).

This writer does not read PULP, and certainly NOT ESCAPE FICTION. How this book came to my attention I cannot recall, but it was sitting there, I was ill, and was not to embark on "The Demons" by Dostoevsky.......
It is truly a mystery as to HOW a book as SHALLOW and "skeletal" as this finds publishing. Perhaps this was part of a contract to be fulfilled? I am perplexed.....
If you look at my reviews you will see that I always try to find something, whatever is positive about a work, a product, anything I review.....I cannot find a single thing to say about this book that is positive. Perhaps that, very broadly speaking, it deals with man's alienation in a "proto"-cybernetic society? Allright, that is as far as you can go with this piece of TRASH-----and TRASH it is.

If Delillo has an IOTA for CHARACTERIZATION you will not find it here. Cartoons are what this book will offer you.
The protagonist, a man with more than his share of Sociopathic traits, never comes alive. He's a product of the ghetto of New York's "Hell's Kitchen"(granted, today another gentrified, cleaned-up area of the city)----- deLillo throwing this morsel at us almost upon closure, and basically an adolescent computer/world currency BILLIONARE who has created an apparatus of intellectual genius/nobodies (paper-thin idiots spewing nonsense) that handles all the affairs of guarding this phony "corporation" (or so)from hackers that's entirely shocking as you read through ......you are PERPLEXED at the shallowness of this whole mumbo-jumbo of "story-telling".....
Has married an heiress for the title, lives at TRUMP's gigantic monolith of a tower across the United Nations, in a triplex all alone, and is a self-proclaimed one very important person in society-------one who moves around with this coarse, risible bodyguard who ends up being killed by our hero.

Dialogue is RIDICULOUS, PRETENTIOUS, ADOLESCENT, pseudo-intellectual, EMPTY, LAUGHABLE...............
The conceit is that he is bent on crossing the island because out of his childish whims he needs a haircut-----really an excuse to go back to his neighborhood in a sentimental twist that deLillo throws in to confuse you in the "good-evil" conundrum that he wants to instill upon you.......A complete failure.....

There isn't a moment when you develop any feelings, any concern, any profound interest in A SINGLE character.......how could you? They are merely skeletons waiting to be given life, of which deLillo is pathetically unable to do.....
So he provides diversions to "entertain" you.....Traffic is stalled, his limousine (white, no less)is almost destroyed in the middle of a mob in Times Square, and most ABSURDLY he comes across the funeral of his IDOL---a rap artist gunned down like Tupac Shakur....... And, can you believe it,he breaks down and cries like a baby for his star.......
To end this ludicrous tale he finally meets his nemesis in a broken-down tenement where he clearly goes to find, as masochistically as he is, his "destiny".
Strictly for the action-packed crowd that delights in ESCAPE entertainment and whose life is sad enough that they are clearly terrified confronting ART------that which is about TRUTH, not shying away from what the minority of us finds satisfaction in.......true substance.......

NEVER AGAIN.................

A total mismash of observations, half baked philosophy, unstructured paragraphs, pointless dialogue. Waste of reading (or listening) time.
I read this after rereading Philip Roth's Zuckerman books. Perhaps that was a mistake. Roth lives and creates life on the page. DeLillo is off in some never never land of his imagination. It does not relate to human experience. It is artificial posturing, meant to shock, but ends up boring.

I recommend you get works by Roth, Updike, Bellow, Richard Ford, Ruth Rendel, among others. Even formula writers like Robert Parker and John Mortimer are more stimlating and fun.

A pretty taxing read. I enjoyed End Zone, which at least had some playfulness to it. Cosmopolis, on the other hand, read like an overwritten knock-off of American Psycho, without the wit and the extreme violence. Maybe it all means something, but Bret Easton Ellis did it a lot better.

Intriguing concept for a novel, and the writing is interesting. It's certainly a fast read, and worth the time. Not a mojor work, but entertaining. Certainly cosmopolis is better than End Zone, and Body Artist.

A fellow reviewer said Cosmopolis is short enough to read in a day. But this book is asking for more time. Eric Packer buffers himself from the present in order to stay ahead of the future--but his gadgets in home and car only give him a false sense of futuristic living. Antiquities like telephones and ATMs are still in operation, much to his chagrin.
What good is Packer's headlong rush into the future, if the sole purpose of this pursuit is to get the money that puts him out of touch?

I read "Cosmopolis" more as another part of DeLillo's body of work than as a stand-alone book, because, almost immmediately, I noticed the tight thickness of the prose and felt that he was trying to capture and convey the same kind of depth he did in "Underworld" but on a smaller scale. This novel is full of perfect sentences that can either enhance or erase themselves after considered reading. The setting and characters are wonderfully suited to the method, a frontier world for the new language DeLillo is still drafting.

This is my second attempt with Don DeLillo, the first being last year's The Body Artist, and having read Cosmopolis, I still don't know what all the fuss is about this guy. Maybe it's an "East Coaster" thing, for the guy just doesn't impress me much. He's the kind of author who attempts to use long words, complex run-on sentence, and go off on long and boring tangents which really have no bearing on the novel, and any real meaning or truth to offer the reader.

Cosmopolis is about a really rich guy who decided that he doesn't want to have his barber come to his skyscraper with his huge office to cut his hair. Instead he's going to take the limo across New York to have the barber cut his hair at his shop. As Mr. Rich attempts to cross town, the president is at the same time coming through with his vast motorcade, and has his life threatened by an assassin. So traffic essentially slows to a complete crawl, while Mr. Rich comfortably travels in his limo.

Along the way, for some reason (probably because he's that rich!), he gets out of the car and meets people he knows, has sex with wives, ex-wives, and "little bits on the side" in their car and their apartment, and all this stuff happens while he is trying to get to the barber shop; essentially about a rich guy using his riches.

So if you would like to read about what it would be like to be so rich that you can get and do absolutely anything you want, read Cosmopolis, and get lost in long sentences that lead you into endless cul-de-sacs.

Originally published on May 12th, 2003 ©Alex C. Telander.

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I saw the movie trailer for David Cronenberg's movie Cosmopolis, based on DeLillo's novel of the same name. The trailer looked interesting. The main character is a young hedge fund manager. I have a fascination with finance and hedge funds. One person commented that the Cosmopolis movie seemed to capture William Gibson's esthetic, and I'm a Gibson fan. So I checked Cosmopolis out of the library.

The beginning of Cosmopolis is all right. There are strange surreal elements, but that all right at first. As the novel proceeds, it completely falls apart and becomes unreadable. The plot goes beyond surreal into incoherent and pointless. After spending an evening reading Cosmopolis, I hated the book so much that I gave the hardcover copy of Underworld that I had sitting on my book shelf, waiting to be read, to the library.

I liked DeLillo's novel Libra. I think that DeLillo captured in fiction a semblance of what actually happened in history. But I have found everything else that I've tried to read by DeLillo unreadable. His novels follow the pattern of Cosmopolis: they start out all right and then veer into eye glazing, mind numbing, incoherence.

I suspect that most readers would have the same reaction to DeLillo that I do. This can be seen in the distribution of the the store reviews, where as many people dislike DeLillo as like him. Still, Delillo's books like Underworld are greeted with favorable reviews. And he seems to sell well enough that publishers keep printing his work. And there are the store reviews who give DeLillo's books favorable reviews.

To some degree I think that DeLillo's success is a scam. I did like Libra, but I bought Underworld because it had a literary reputation. There was a part of me that thought that reading the book would "broaden" my mind. I think that many book reviewers follow the same path. They feel that they can't savage DeLillo because he's a prominent author of literary fiction. If they write that he's incoherent people might think that the reviewer is not smart enough to understand DeLillo. Therein lies the scam. The truth is that DeLillo is incoherent and he seems incapable of writing the kind of novel that most people would want to read.

There is a school of thought that great literature must be a lot of work to read. You have to work, the thinking goes, to understand the great thoughts and art of the great writer of literary fiction. University literature departments tend to be based on this idea. People who subscribe to this school of thought read (or claim to read) writers like Joyce, Pynchon and DeLillo.

Perhaps this view is slogging and suffering through literature is popular in University Lit departments because learning science and mathematics is a lot of work. Any "serious" intellectual endeavor must be hard won. If literature were simply enjoyable recreation, who would take it seriously? Or pay professors to explain it to them.

I have a different view of literature. There are vast numbers of books published every year. There are vast numbers of books that have been published in the past. In one lifetime I can read only a relatively small number of these books. If I want to work hard on a book, I'll read a book on computer science or mathematical finance. But I read fiction, history and current events for enjoyment. Recreational reading should be exactly that: recreation. Writers like DeLillo are at best a huge amount of work to read. I have no desire to slog through literary fiction. Especially when I think that it is reasonable to expect a gifted writer to write a coherent novel, with an interesting plot and characters. Delillo fails as far as I am concerned.

For those of you who are Robert Pattinson fans, note that the New York Times review of the Cronenberg movie based on Cosmopolis mentioned that the movie closely follows the book. This suggests that you will see a portrayal of the character Eric Packer getting a prostate exam, while his female colleague masturbates with a water bottle. In addition you can expect all of the bizarre and incoherent plot twists of the novel. So if your idea of a good movie is avant-garde European cinema, then this might be the movie for you. Otherwise, even R-Pat might not be worthwhile enough to justify sitting through this movie. I am certainly going to give it a pass.

I think people are just scared to admit that this book is terrible lest they be snubbed by other members of the Book Snob Elite. Unfortunately, Brett Easton Ellis did this story a long time ago - and better. DeLillo sleepwalked through this one - a total waste of time. Not worth finishing for any good reason at all.

I read it quickly, enjoying some of the passages which were funny at times, insightful and sometimes cruel. A book I will remember, but did not manage to engage me. I would not recommend it, but would not dismiss it either, some of the qualities are worth exploring.

Delillo seems to think his "observations" are novel and deep. In truth, Delillo's "observations" in this little novella are phony, pretentious, inane, immature, misguided, blase, uninspired, and downright imbecilic at times.

I'd offer some quotations to back this up but this book already found it's rightful place (before it could be finished): the trash can of a train station.

This read like some sort of bizarre cross between DeLillo's usual affectless style and some awestruck lifestyle piece from GQ, or the more vapid passages of later Tom Wolfe (Man in Full and so forth). The structure and style reflect DeLillo's sparse elegance, but - and one wonders whether this was an attempt at something with broader audience appeal or potential for film adaptation - they and the author struggle to engage with a contrived and clearly unfamiliar world.

I bought this book because Robert Pattinson is the lead actor in a movie being filmed based on the book.
I did not understand what I read. I did not know any more when I finished the book than I
did after reading the first page.
I hope the movie will be easier to understand.
This is the only book I purchased on the store that I did not like. That wasn't the store's fault though.
Just finished reading Water For Elephants, and am excited about seeing the movie in April.

Right about the time I polished off "Underworld" for the third time, this new tome by the same author comes along. At just over 200 pages, I figured this would be a quick way to get some more DeLillo under my belt before I tackled any of his early works. I figured wrong.
"Underworld", for all it's brilliance, contained numerous dull passages, often of a rather lengthy nature, many of them made dull by seemingly motiveless characters who wandered around performing inexplicable acts of minimal consequence, all in the name of some presumable Big Statement that never coalesced. BUT, and it's a big but (note the caps!), there were a superior number of masterful plot threads that were successfully brought to fruition, and it was these latter threads that not only saved the novel but made it one of the best published in the last ten years (I say this, of course, not having read much genre fiction, but if that's your bag you're probably not reading this review anyway).
The problem with "Cosmopolis" can be summed up rather succinctly: it contains all of the drawbacks of "Underworld" without any of the payoffs. The lead character, Eric Packer, never clicks with the reader, even though all the Big Statement elements inherent in this plot are telegraphed way in advance (hell, the stretch limo on the cover just about says it all, and considering DeLillo is no minimalist that's not a good sign). The symbolism of having a disenfranchised ex-executive plotting to assassinate Packer also seems a bit obvious a ploy for someone as skilled in sketching out characters as Delillo.
"Cosmopolis" is further burdened by a long laundry list of non-events that make up the plot and offer little resolution; a scene toward the end where Packer bursts into tears at a rapper's funeral seems to come out of nowhere, and nothing in the narrative up to that point has sufficiently illustrated the kind of growing remorse that leads to the inexplicable final quarter of the book. Nonetheless, believeable or not, once it's been made clear that Packer has growned disillusioned with his world to the point of self-destruction, the novel's denouement seems not only obvious but inevitable.
All in all, not one of Delillo's finer works. In fact, this is exactly the type of book where you can get a good idea of it's quality from reading reviews. You can never agree with any one critic 100% of the time, but when a universal cross section of write ups all point to the same pros or cons of any given work it's about as good advice as you're going to get prior to reading the book for yourself. Which is indeed recommended, but in the case of Delillo and "Cosmopolis" do yourself a favor and save this one for last.

I'm not sure I completely understood what Delillo was trying to do with this novel. I understood the whole description of what it was like to be a powerful corporate entity who had an infinite amount of money and who everyone hated for what he represented, but beyond that, the story is very problematic. Delillo seems to be saying that certain character traits are an essential part of anyone as materialistic (not in the I need to buy things sense, but rather the I need to own or have dominion over as much as possible sense) as his protagonist Eric. There was an element of Sartre and Camus in that this corporate demigod wanted some sort of consequence to take place for his misdeeds (including killing his own bodyguard and losing millions of dollars betting against the Yen), but something was simply missing. I think it would have been more effective if Delillo would have simply put the fiction aside and simply written some diatribe on the dangers of money because this whole novel seems to fence-sit, trying to be both a philosophical exploration and great novel, unfortunately failing miserably at both. Although I may not love the philosophy that much, Rand is much more successful at providing entertaining stories and a schematic of her own philosophy than anything I've seen Delillo write.