Written just after 9-11, and as a writer in love with his city, DeLillo continues his ode to New York with this book, based around the life of a young rich businessman Eric Packer as he gets stuck in various traffic jams in his limo. The author says on the first page about Eric’s relationship with poetry, “A poem bared the moment to the things he was not normally prepared to notice.” He then forces the reader to notice every detail by weighting the prose like a poem, the beats roll and reading becomes a chant, turning into a story, like a wheel, travelling into the doom.
It’s not a long book, and easy to read in one sitting. The prose drives you into that limo and into Eric’s head. His relationships with others are almost psychotic. But Eric is in disguise: an entirely genius thinker who studies complex philosophy, science, and languages and yet appears flat on the outside. He compares himself to his building, that has “the kind of banality that over time reveals itself to be truly brutal…. He felt contiguous with it.” In fact, this story hides Eric inside the city, as if he is melded into it, an essential cog in the machine. When he loses his fortune over the course of the day, the city seems to die with it, getting more and more clogged.
Cosmopolis is simply lovely if you love words. Sentences are beautiful, crafted like circles of rounded language – and yet, with a sting. It’s as if the author meditated on the use of every word until he found the exact rhythm of the phrase. For this reason, it’s a gorgeous reading experience. Instead of doing what he did with “Falling Man” his previous book that hit 9-11 loss too hard on the nose and seems a little tasteless (performance artist gives the audience “falling man” with their foot in a rope hanging upside down) this book is more holistic, seeing New York as a living beast that assimilates those who step too close.
There’s something of “The Razor’s Edge” in its deeply spiritual allegory and careful, slow journey, with Eric as maybe what Larry Darrell would have become if he had stayed: Eric’s soul is very different from the person he projects, and he holds court in the limo with various characters that seem to think he is giving them something: sex, money, gratitude, but it seems he drains all of them before they leave exasperated or fed up. There’s something “Ulysses” about it, a quest with no tangible demand, an odyssey that Packer seems to expect to implode at any time. In this, a foreshadowing threads through the story, as if every moment is Packer’s last. This stark, suicidal attitude he has with everything shows the reader that something is going to go wrong. We wait for it, what it could be, in the traffic jam with Eric.
This book shows what can be achieved with words. Sounds obvious, but it’s true. There’s no filler here to get us from A to B. Everything is needed, and everything means something to the next line.
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