Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned ...
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Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . . An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's Bonfire or Ellis's Psycho, Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized.
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Don DeLillo's short novel "Cosmopolis" (2003) is a tale of modern life filled with violence, money and materialism, the lust for sex and power, the apparently all-encompassing nature of technology and gadgetry, and self-centerdness. The novel fails because it is too full of itself and loses touch with the world it purports to describe.
The novel is set in New York City in April, 2000. The primary character is Eric Packer a wunderkind who at the age of 28 has become a billionaire as an investment manager. The story takes place over one day as Packer, suffering from sleeplessness and loneliness, decides to get a haircut across town. He so instructs the crew of his fully-equipped white stretch limo, who advise him that this is not the best of days to be out and about in the streets of New York. The President of the United States is in town and their have been threats to the President's life and to Packer's own. No matter. A haircut across town it will be.
In addition to insisting on his haircut, Packer shows his stubborness and hubris in another way. He has taken the most severe risks financially by borrowing money in the currency exchange thinking that the Japanese yen will lose value. During the course of the day, the yen continues to rise, and Packer goes broke.
Packer's day-long journey in his limo is filled with visitors, including his doctor, who examines him every day, various economists and financial advisers, and sexual encounters including one with his young and wealthy wife of 22 days. There are scenes of riots in the streets, shootings, a suicide by burning, the funeral of a famous rapper of whom Packer is fond, a movie shooting in which 300 extras lie on the street naked, and violence, by and against Packer.
Portions of the book, especially the earliest pages, have a directness and immediacy to the writing that hold out promise. Unfortunately, the book does not succeed. I think the book's major shortcoming lies in its polemical style and in its attendant excess. DeLillo has no sympathy with what he perceives to be the modern world of high-tech and high finance. His writing about it is skewed, shrill, and unconvincing. On an individual scale, Eric Packer is portrayed as on the whole a brilliant but dislikable character whose human traits have been buried in the pursuit of wealth, power, knowledge, and sex. With the exception of a few moments, Packer and his fate didn't engage me. DeLillo draws him simply to fit his ideological vision of the unjust character of modern capitalism and the cataclysmic finish to which he believes it is leading. Packer's escapades are too outlandish in themselves to be meaningful commentary. For me the book falls flat.
In the book, Packer is shown as computing every logarithm and performing every study to support his belief that the value of the yen "must" fall. There is a strong message in the book about the limitations of knowledge and of chance -- the folly of thinking that, in any given case, any individual or group can be astute enough to identify and assess all the options and to reach a certain conclusion. This is wise advise indeed. Alas, in the case of this book, this wisdom is overwhelmed by a mass of stridency, shrillness, and self-certainty in the author in his own critique of aspects of modern life of which he greatly disapproves. The virtues of humility and the sense of human fallibility are valuable traits for writers and social critics -- as well as for billionaire financiers and for those obsessed with money and power.
