Customer Reviews

Cosmopolis: A Novel

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I read this book over a year ago and it was very well written but I often found it hard to follow the plot. A lot of stuff is happening around Eric Packer and often I felt like it had no point and was not sure what was going on. Overall, I liked the book but it was not a book you picked up for a casual read, you really had to be paying attention to the entire scene. Interesting to see what the movie will be like.

As a novel it fails in every possible way: plot, characterization, dialogue etc.
If you consider Cosmopolis a prose poem it works a lot better. DeLillo should have gone all the way and write directly in verse. Cosmopolis could have been compared to The Dunciad, The Age of Anxiety, the 'dramatic monologues' of Robert Browning, The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Prelude, Byron.
In poetry the greatest possible meaning has to be expressed in the smallest possible space, and I think it works (to a point) in Cosmopolis.
The dialogues don't have to be naturalistic - just meaningful. The characters don't be to well rounded - they are just human types. The plot doesn't have to hang togheter - it has to illustrate the morality of the story.
The writing of DeLillo, in this way, is quite beatiful and his description of the effects that ridicolous wealth and power can have on people (both the rich, the hangers-on, the others) feels right.
And I don't really think that Cosmopolis is dated. A lot of things have changed after 9/11: among them not the lives of people like Eric Packer. Frankly I don't understand people who thinks that people like him are uninteresting or not important. Rich and powerful people are always interesting and important and no, they don't have to be sympathetic or human to command obedience, respect and even affection.
Of course, a real novel would have been better. Underworld is much better and important. Cosmopolis is an interesting attempt.

I guess I was lucky in that I began with Mao II and White Noise and went from there. So I know what DeLillo is capable of. I was giddy to read this new one. But, like other reviewers, I was reminded of Brett Easton Ellis, even from the title (which reminded me of "Glamorama"). And that made me nervous right away.

The worst part about this novel is that it's completely contrived. We never get the feeling these characters are truly alive, only that DeLillo is trying to tell us something via their interaction. The coincidental meetings with the wife (you'll see) are a perfect example. But there are others. If we're just going to ride around in a limo, slowly, without any solid plot to hang our hat on, then anyone who happens to stop in for a chat will appear to have been shoved into that limo by the author.

But for the good news: it's DeLillo. A fix for the addict. His dialogue is sharp, funny and truncated, as always. Some of the passages are pure poetry (the section about the kids dancing at a rave in a burnt-out building is sublime). We know about DeLillo's apocalyptic obsessions, which were firmly in place long before 9/11, and this is more of the same. Or is it? He never mentions terrorism, but he's got a two-bit gang of thugs flinging rats around the city in demonstrations against capitalism. And there are threats on the protagonist's life. And it takes place in New York City. NYC is the cosmopolis of the title, the "city of the world," a stage that shows a microcosm of the terror in store for all mankind. So this is good old prescient DeLillo, warbling, and the sound of it will stand up to anything being written today.

Don't get this if you've never read any Don DeLillo--you'll probably be turned off. Mao II and White Noise are both great starting points, but even some of the earlier stuff that DD has since scorned (Americana, End Zone, Great Jones Street) would be a better beginning.

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.

Right from the beginning, this book gives you an eerie feeling. It has an unsettling mood, set off initially by being told that the young 28-year old hero/tycoon hasn't slept in 4 to 5 days. You don't have to stretch your imagination much to realize that weird, unpredictable things are going to happen and that his life is out of control, because he's not thinking clearly. He's doing things in an 'out of body' way. And added to this personal out-of-kilter state, the author adds a series of punishingly, over-the-top events to make life even more hapahazard for him, as he rides uptown and crosstown in Manhattan in his limousine, looking for a barbershop. On the way, there are stops for sex; there are rambling conversations with advisors; there are encounters with a rioting mob pounding the limousine; there's a stop to watch two kids play basketball; there's another stop to play a bit part in a movie nude scene. On tenth avenue, he reaches the barbershop that he has been symbolically seeking in the neighborhood that his father grew up in. He meets his father's old barber and the story, for a moment takes on a palpable reality, with the clipped dialogue between him, his driver and the barber. Then there is the final encounter with a disgruntled employee, seeking his revenge. Heavy stuff. More palatable than Chuck Palahniuk, however, and with some great scenes, such as in the barbershop. But, hey, aside from that, this guy is unbelievable. He didn't have the gumption to save himself, and the book doesn't offer one good reason why he didn't.

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.

I was fortunate to read End Zone in the year of publication. Great Jones Street, et al - I've been on board. Even attended the Underworld book tour appearance in Los Angeles. Plus he's Italian.

The voice I hear in his latest, is Don DeLillo's chronological one; not that of a 28-year old. Not even close.

Another poster has made the comparison to Bret Easton Ellis; I too felt his shadow fall on these pages (despite the dedication to Paul Auster).

I would recommend the reading of this book. It's only that you are getting the up-to-date DeLillo.

Similar to the great improvisers of jazz, a musician peaks, levels-off and 'the sound of surprise' is 'ner more.

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.

DeLillo's latest novel continues his tradition of being more interested in the ideas his characters represent than in the characters themselves. This is not necessarily a criticism; it just means that one must come to his novels with different expectations. DeLillo is a master of writing brilliant scenes, and often likes to lead off a book with a particularly wonderful set piece. In Mao II, it was a Moonie mass wedding; in Underworld, it was the fateful baseball game in 1954 which decided the World Series and which occurred simultaneously with the explosion of the Soviet Union's first H-Bomb.

Cosmopolis does not lead off with such a set piece, but contains many wonderfully executed scenes, such as the anarchist riot, the funeral cortege for a dead rapper named Brother Fez, and the movie shoot involving hundreds of naked people lying in the street.

But for all the brilliance of these individual scenes, the whole is somewhat unconvincing; characters talk to each other in abstractions, their actions not always believable. In particular, the scene where Eric Packer shoots another character in an off-handed, impulsive manner did not fit the person who in other scenes shows compassion, for example, for his limo driver. That scene in particular felt like the author's hand forcing the action out of a desire to derive delicious irony from it, but without regard to whether it fit what the character would actually do.

Yet despite these faults, this book is so compelling in some of its scenes that it is definitely worthy of reading and reflection.

cosmopolis is wanting in many ways. if you have come to appreciate the remarkable humour in an average delillo book, this will, no doubt, disappoint. certain touches are fantastic: delillo's exploration of the car itself (yes, in some sense, the one on the cover) is quite good, and the way in which the relationship between the protagonist and his wife plays out is also something to hold on to, but otherwise the book was, for me, non-engaging. the alternate naratives were, i thought, poorly executed and served little purpose in the end. one would have expected a brilliantly sharp moment of insight, an epiphany of sorts, yet instead the story ends up (essentially) fizzeling (fizzing? fizzle-ing? fizzling?) out with the end result nearly forcing the query: where's the ingenuity?

instead try on underworld, white noise, ratner's star, or mao II. they all do an excellent job of showcasing delillo's writing style and his true talent, talent you might not notice if you restrict yourself to cosmopolis.