Delillo's Cosmopolis
Cosmopolis
A long time ago, Don DeLillo was an outsider to the world of letters, stuck in the trenches of capitalism at an advertising agency. His first novel, Americana, was about a successful 28-year-old television executive who heads west to seek greater meaning than his corporate existence has offered.
Today DeLillo is as entrenched in the literary world as it is possible to be, and the subject of his 13th novel, Cosmopolis, is capital. The central character is another 28-year-old, a billionaire "asset manager" named Eric Packer, who lives in a 48-room apartment on the eastern edge of midtown Manhattan. A believer in technology and markets, he is the kind of person who is surprised that anyone cares about presidents anymore. Packer, too, is headed west, but aims only for the other side of Manhattan, where he wants to get a haircut. His crosstown limousine ride, slowed by a presidential motorcade and by an anti-market riot, takes all day — and most of this slender book's pages.
A "haircut" also happens to be a slang term for a major financial loss, and even if you miss the hints on the flap copy, you're likely to guess almost immediately that Packer is headed for one of those, too. He has directed his firm to make what is clearly an enormous bet that the yen will fall. It can't go any higher, the young money man keeps saying; yet higher it goes.
This setup — a titan of capital on a two-mile drive that goes on for 200 pages — sounds like a cross between Tom Wolfe and Nicholson Baker. But unlike Wolfe, DeLillo has little patience for the gritty details of business and no apparent interest in verisimilitude. (Packer says things like, "I haven't been sleeping much. I look at books and drink brandy. But what happens to all the stretch limousines that prowl the throbbing city all day long?") And despite the pointedly un-heroic physical dimensions of Packer's journey, this is not a Baker-like anti-odyssey of the mundane: In the course of the day, the protagonist has meals, has meetings, has a prostate exam and has sex (more than once). As if all this and the distressing real-time data about the yen streaming into his elaborately tricked-out limo weren't enough, his chief bodyguard tells him there is information of a threat against Packer's life.
The book is set in April 2000, and given DeLillo's past interest in crowds (physical or virtual), media culture and the phenomena that link them, it makes sense that he would be drawn to the bull-market mania of the late 1990s, which was certainly as perplexing and scary as the "airborne toxic event" that haunted his novel White Noise. So it's odd how disengaged he seems here. His Packer is a cartoon character, cold, calculating and controlling, in a way that's ridiculous without ever being funny. At one point he insists that his art dealer find out what it would cost for him to buy the entire Rothko Chapel and have it rebuilt within in his apartment. This is one of many quasi-satiric passages that thud.
Packer also happens to have an interest in poetry, which he reads on sleepless nights. Perhaps this explains his unlikely speaking style. "There's a poem I read in which the rat becomes the unit of currency," he informs one of his subordinates. (The line "a rat became the unit of currency," from Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert's "Report from a Besieged City," is the book's epigraph.) Rats run through Cosmopolis, in conversation and in the form of outsized Styrofoam likenesses built by protesters.
One suspects that this is a heavy clue as to DeLillo's feeling about hyper-capitalism. But the most interesting comments on this central theme come from Vija Kinski, the Packer employee who holds a most pleasingly DeLillo-esque title: "chief of theory." From the rear of the limo, she holds forth: "Money has taken a turn. All wealth has become wealth for its own sake. . . . Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself." And so on. This sort of loopy but seductive riffing is the sort of thing that DeLillo writes better than almost anyone else; even when it's preposterous, it manages to be provocative or at least fun. Kinski tells Packer to stick with his hunch on the yen. "If you know something and don't act upon it, then you didn't know it in the first place. . . . To pull back would not be authentic. It would be a quotation from other people's lives."
Sadly, Kinski gets little face time with the boss and disappears quickly. Her cosmic rambles are the closest DeLillo comes to clarifying what exactly he's up to here. This unhappy ride does not so much reach a specific destination as simply end. And for better or worse, there's no mistaking Cosmopolis for anything but a DeLillo novel — a later DeLillo novel, told in a voice that is extremely somber, reflective, lyrical and very consciously literary. His sentences, by now unmistakable, here are meant to suggest profound truths. But in practice they are somewhat bloodless, not unlike Packer himself, whose story is less than a joy to read.
This review appeared in the April 27, 2003, issue of The Washington Post.
