Don DeLillo’s great strength as a writer is the quality of his prose, which at its best is simultaneously engaging and estranging. If Updike’s fictional project is to give the mundane its beautiful due, DeLillo’s is to make the mundane beautifully strange. DeLillo stumbles, however, when his prose’s luminosity is yoked to philosophical banality. Because its subject is often late-capitalist society’s flattening of affect, DeLillo’s fiction will risk seeming banal. The biggest problem, however, is when his prose seems enamoured of its own affect and forgets what wider point it is supposed to be in service to.
Like much of DeLillo’s fiction, Cosmopolis is set in New York City; but whereas previous novels evoked the dilapidation of the Bronx, Cosmopolis takes inspiration from the blank faces of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. At home in this world of surface is the novel’s protagonist, Eric Packer: a multi-billionaire currency trader who reads Einstein’s special theory of relativity in English and German, likes inscrutable white paintings featuring ‘knife-applied slabs of mucoid color’, and is so obviously a caricature of postmodern ennui that it’s difficult to care very much about him (8). He conducts abstruse discussions about cyber capital, and he really wants a haircut; in classic postmodern style, he treats both equally seriously.
All Cosmopolis’s action occurs on one particularly hectic Manhattan day, during which the US Presidential motorcade (‘Just so I know. Which president are we talking about?’ Packer asks) and a rapper’s funeral cortege gridlock New York, such that traffic ‘speaks in quarter inches (11).’ Rat-flinging anarchists are also protesting globalisation. Nonetheless, Packer sits in his armoured limousine and buys stupefying quantities of yen; his portentous justification: ‘Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first (21).’ His recent marriage remains unconsummated, but he has perfunctory sex with one of his (female) bodyguards, and, separately, with an artist. His chief of finance masturbates while she watches him undergo a prostate exam, which he receives in the limo because he is apparently willing to be driven to a barbershop but not to a doctor’s surgery.
Insouciant and capricious, Packer presumably gives his security detail nightmares because he often hops in and out of his car unannounced. Occasionally and by chance, he even encounters his wife. Security is not, however, this day pro forma, because there is a ‘credible’ security threat, and as is common in DeLillo’s work, assassination is coyly implied (101). Packer loses first his then his wife’s fortune to the abstractions of the currency market, but though financially ruined the loss energises him: he luxuriates in the physicality of the street, undresses, lies naked with three hundred others, and becomes a passive extra. Ultimately, he meets his would-be assassin, and the novel ends with him ‘alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound (209).’
Cosmopolis is often dismayingly silly, but some serious points should be made about it. The blurb’s comparison of it to a prose poem is accurate: there’s the same focus on cadence and on lapidary compression. But these aesthetic qualities seem to be only self-referential and hermetic, as though DeLillo is so obsessed with being rhetorically convincing that he forgets what he is trying to convince the reader of. The prose evokes a world in which technology deforms subjectivity – ‘Why die when you can live on a disk?’ – but this future of bodies-without-organs cannot sustain a reader’s interest, for two main reasons.
Firstly, Eric Packer is not a likeable protagonist. While likability is not essential for artistic success, if it is absent, there should be compensation elsewhere. Richard III succeeds because Richard is charismatically perfidious[1]; Packer’s speech is euphuistic and pretentious, and his actions – ‘an aesthetics of interaction’ – are so couched in abstraction that even when he does kill someone the act feels empty and stylised (86). Packer’s ‘coldest prospect’ is that no one is out to kill him after all, but we have little interest in his sorrow (169).
Secondly, DeLillo’s best novels – such as Libra and Underworld – tend to use history, particularly the Kennedy assassination, as a structuring metaphor, and this gives the narrative traction and purpose. These novels treat history as an attempt to impose a narrative upon endlessly proliferating social and cultural forces; history’s legitimacy is questioned, such that it begins to look more like an officially sanctioned conspiracy. The Kennedy assassination; 9/11: it seems impossible to write these events’ histories in a way commensurate with their significance. And since significance is in the eye of the beholder, who gets to decide what an authentic history comprises?
Suspicions regarding objectivity and questions of authenticity are evident at Cosmopolis’s crux: ‘To pull back now would not be authentic. It would be a quotation from other people’s lives. A paraphrase of a sensible text that wants you to believe there are plausible realities, okay, that can be traced and analysed (85).’ The novel exists squarely and incorrigibly in a world of simulacra, in which things are ‘quoted’ but never experienced; whither subjectivity when everything is second-hand? (The rap lyrics on pp. 137-138 probably come closest to something vital and authentic.) Cosmopolis’s diagnosis of contemporary culture may well be accurate, but its insights are hardly novel; it wants to be satirical, but it offers only existential zaniness and criminality as alternatives to cultural enervation.
The novel’s conclusion echoes The Crying of Lot 49’s agonising deferral of understanding: both Oedipa Maas and Eric Packer wait passively to learn their respective fates. Oedipa is a suburban housewife who may have sought transcendent meaning in vain, and Packer is a hyper-capitalist who realises that life is not crystalline, immured, but corporeal. The former is tragic, the latter could have been: a meditation on subjective loss and final redemption. Ultimately, Packer’s nemesis, Benno Levin, tells him, ‘You should have listened to your prostate (199).’ It is a final reminder, if it were needed, that Eric Packer is an asshole.
Works Referenced
Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (London: Picador, 2011)
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