Cosmopolis - Hardcover

Don DeLillo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330412760 ISBN 13: 9780330412766

Publisher: RB Large Print, 2003

Synopsis

From Publishers Weekly DeLillo skates through a day in the life of a brilliant and precocious New Economy billionaire in this monotone 13th novel, a study in big money and affectlessness. As one character remarks, 28-year-old Eric Packer "wants to be one civilization ahead of this one." But on an April day in the year 2000, Eric's fortune and life fall apart. The story tracks him as he traverses Manhattan in his stretch limo. His goal: a haircut at Anthony's, his father's old barber. But on this day his driver has to navigate a presidential visit, an attack by anarchists and a rapper's funeral. Meanwhile, the yen is mounting, destroying Eric's bet against it. The catastrophe liberates Eric's destructive instinct-he shoots another character and increases his bet. Mostly, the action consists of sequences in the back of the limo (where he stages meetings with his doctor, various corporate officers and a New Economy guru) interrupted by various pit stops. He lunches with his wife of 22 days, Elise Shifrin. He has sex with two women, his art consultant and a bodyguard. He is hit in the face with a pie by a protester. He knows he is being stalked, and the novel stages a final convergence between the ex-tycoon and his stalker. DeLillo practically invented the predominant vernacular of the late '90s (the irony, the close reading of consumer goods, the mock complexity of technobabble) in White Noise, but he seems surprisingly disengaged here. His spotlighted New Economy icon, Eric, doesn't work, either as a genius financier (he is all about gadgetry, not exchange-there's no love of the deal in his "frozen heart") or a thinker. The threats posed by the contingencies that he faces cannot lever him out of his recalcitrant one-dimensionality. DeLillo is surely an American master, but this time out, he is doodling. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About this title

About the Author:

Don DeLillo is the author of two plays and thirteen novels, including Underworld, White Noise and, most recently, The Body Artist. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

From AudioFile:

Don DeLillo has avid fans who adore the humor, symbolism, and neo-Gothic fantasy of Underworld and his other novels. In this one, a youngish tycoon enters his custom-made limo to traverse Manhattan for a haircut. The journey takes him an entire day, becoming an odyssey of erotic and satiric adventures, ending with a confrontation with his would-be assassin. Echoes of Joyce, Cheever, and Tom Robbins abound. Will Patton lowers his rugged voice to a near whisper, imbuing the entire exercise with a sinister presentiment of doom. In so doing, much of the humor is sacrificed. The combination of murky text and mumbling reader makes the novel difficult to concentrate on. Y.R. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: RB Large Print
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0330412760
• ISBN 13: 9780330412766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224