Don DeLillo: Cosmopolis
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, June 2003]
Near the beginning of Don DeLillo’s new novel, Cosmopolis (Scribner, $25), 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer – a financial futurist, arrogant yet reflective and curious – eases into his marble-floored, cork-lined limousine. He needs a haircut. En route, he battles the crowd on the streets – a presidential motorcade, a rap star’s funeral procession, protesters of capitalism – and takes a series of mid-ride meetings with his team of advisors, one of whom cautions Packer on his reckless borrowing of the unpredictable yen, a currency whose patterns he is determined to uncover. Also in his cross-town path are various lovers, his new wife – an heiress-poet whom he continually barely recognizes – and, ultimately, a foaming ex-employee whose separate-chaptered notes from underground spell out Packer’s fate.
DeLillo’s prose is both imaginative and exact. Beyond the city lie “toothpaste suburbs.” A local diner holds “the cross-roar of accents and languages.” In a rave’s blink dance “a cult of starvelings.” A powerful mogul, whose assassination invigorates Packer, is captured in a single image: “Filthy rich, this chap. Women in his soup.” As he did memorably in his mammoth novel “Underworld,” DeLillo expertly portrays the public’s gallop, which contains, as he puts it here, “coded moments of gesture and dance.” These moments are delivered vividly, and with a controlled rhythm, as is this glimpse of the rap star’s mourners: “Scores of women walked alongside the limousines, in headscarves and djellabas, hands stained with henna, and barefoot, and wailing.”
“Cosmopolis” is a brief book that’s big on ideas: sex and death, power and wealth and numbers. (In a quickly passing yet lasting metaphor, DeLillo describes how massive wealth has wiped the faces from our currency: “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”) And while the story’s fuel is the fiscal, each of the book’s ideas is tied to its largest one: time. It’s no insignificant detail that the book’s cork-lined limo is a nod to the time-obsessed writer Marcel Proust, whose own dwelling was cork-lined. (Packer proudly calls his limo “prousted.”)
Proud though he may be, Packer the futurist still must live by the same ticks as the rest of us, which have ticked since we don’t know when. And what’s fascinating about this character is that while he’s a bastard egoist, he’s given the added dimension of being aware of, even awed by, the world’s real mysteries. In one scene, during his in-limo doctor’s check-up, Packer looks at the screen that displays his heart, feeling “the passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars.”
But the novel’s last voice could be Benno Levin’s, the foaming ex-employee, who in the final pages is given the run-in with Packer for which he’s been waiting, armed. These two, powerless and powerful, powerful and powerless, are linked by the common mysteries of the world. “There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time,” Levin had written in his journal. “Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?” He stands, in the end, with Packer, the fated futurist who’s forced to wait for the present to take place.
