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Summary
Summary
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end -- those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments.Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age 28, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.
Author Notes
Don DeLillo was born in the Bronx, New York on November 20, 1936. He received a bachelor's degree in communication arts from Fordham University in 1958. After graduation, he was a copywriter for an advertising company and wrote short stories on the side. His first story, The River Jordan, was published two years later in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University.
His first novel, Americana, was published in 1971. His other works include Ratner's Star, The Names, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and The Angel Esmeralda, a collection of short stories. He won several awards including the National Book Award for fiction in 1985 for White Noise, the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992 for Mao II, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
It's April in the year 2000 in the cosmopolis of New York. A day of epic gridlock due to a visit by the president and a violent antiglobalization protest. A good day to leave the white stretch limo at the curb, but assets manager Eric Packer, 28, buff, ruthless, and obscenely wealthy, insists on being driven across town to get a haircut. His chief of security objects: there's a credible threat against his life. But this only encourages Packer, who likes to rule his domain from his high-tech chariot, where his employees crawl in to make their reports, where myriad screens carry the ceaseless data stream of the currency markets, where a doctor performs his daily check-up. Quasi-mystic Packer is obsessed, on this fateful day, with the yen, strangely aroused by graphic coverage of the murders of other major financial players, and keenly aware that he has the power to pitch the entire monetary system into chaos. Packer is, in short, a monster--a man who has lost his soul in an accelerated world without heart. And DeLillo, master novelist and seer, tells the surreal, electrifying story of this dehumanized moneyman in English scrubbed so clean and assembled so exquisitely it seems like a new language. By turns breathtakingly poetic and devastatingly witty, his descriptions of today's urban reality--extravagantly kinetic Times Square financial displays (information as "pure spectacle") presided over by gigantic billboards of the "underwear gods" --make the present seem like a forbidding, to-be-avoided future. "We need a new theory of time," muses one of Packer's advisors. No, suggests DeLillo, we need to reclaim life. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Unlike his sprawling masterpiece, Underworld, DeLillo's 13th novel is short and tightly focused, indeed almost claustrophobic. Most of the action takes place inside a "prousted" (cork-lined) stretch limo, as the reclusive financial wizard Eric Packer is chauffeured across Manhattan for a haircut. Thanks to a presidential visit, antiglobalization demonstrations, and a celebrity funeral, this journey takes up most of the day. Stuck in traffic, Packer anxiously monitors the value of the yen on the limo's computer. Using the car as his office, he summons advisors from nearby shops and restaurants. His physician gives him a rubber-gloved physical exam in the back seat as Packer discusses imminent financial ruin with his broker and angry crowds block the streets. This work most closely resembles The Body Artist in its brevity and straightforward narrative flow. However, the earlier novel was written in an uncharacteristically warm, poetic style, promising a new direction for this important writer, while Cosmopolis reverts to the standard DeLillo boilerplate, perceptive and funny but also brittle and cold. This, coupled with the book's dated 1990s sensibility, makes Cosmopolis a step backward rather than an artistic advance.-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.