The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo
reviewed by Robert L. McLaughlin

Don DeLillo. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003. 209 pp. $25.00.

Cosmopolis is set in April 2000, a postmillennial, pre-9/11 time significant for being a month removed from the NASDAQ’s record-setting closing number, 5048.62. This, then, is the beginning of the end of the nineties boom, and DeLillo’s protagonist, billionaire currency- and stock-speculator Eric Packer, is poised on the surface of a bubble that’s about to burst. On one level, the narrative is quite simple: Eric leaves his multistoried, multimillion-dollar apartment on Manhattan’s east side and takes a trip across town on 47th Street in his custom-made limo to get a haircut, a journey delayed by midtown traffic, a presidential motorcade, a broken water main, a rap star’s funeral procession, an anti-global-capital riot, and Eric’s whims. It is also a journey from riches to rags (as Eric’s hubristic speculations bring his empire crashing down), from morning to night, from life to death—all reinforcing the inevitability of time’s arrow. Yet at the same time it is a journey from the present to the past: Eric’s destination is his father’s childhood neighborhood and the barbershop where Eric had his first haircut—this man whose success is based in his ability not just to predict the future but to bring that future into being needs the familiarity, the repetition, the sameness of his distant past. The novel’s structure reflects this tension between the forward and backward movement of time: the bulk of the narrative follows Eric’s trip from river to river chronologically, but two interpolated excerpts from the journals of Benno Levin (a.k.a. Richard Sheets), ex-currency analyst and current homeless person who will, apparently, kill Eric, are presented chronologically backward and out of sync with Eric’s narrative.

These structural and thematic explorations of time provide the context for Eric’s search for patterns—the predictable and controllable—in numbers, nature, and life, versus life’s tendency to offer us uncontrollable random phenomena—surprise. Within the rigid order of the day, Eric is offered many surprises: several unexpected encounters with his mysterious wife; the unaccountable and (for him) disastrous rise of the yen against the dollar; a cream pie in the face courtesy of an international pastry terrorist; and his chance encounter with Benno, who has staked his own identity on Eric’s death. As surprise overwhelms him, Eric tries more and more rashly to assert control, swinging from the homicidal to the suicidal.

Once again, DeLillo has captured the essence of a particular American moment: the solipsism of power, the paranoia of control, the inequities and immateriality of wealth, the shock of recognition as a system begins to collapse. Cosmopolis is a beautiful and brilliant book.