Rating: 
Summary: It's DeLillo, but...
Review: I was fortunate to read End Zone in the year of publication. Great Jones Street, et al - I've been on board. Even attended the Underworld book tour appearance in Los Angeles. Plus he's Italian. The voice I hear in his latest, is Don DeLillo's chronological one; not that of a 28-year old. Not even close. Another poster has made the comparison to Bret Easton Ellis; I too felt his shadow fall on these pages (despite the dedication to Paul Auster). I would recommend the reading of this book. It's only that you are getting the up-to-date DeLillo. Similar to the great improvisers of jazz, a musician peaks, levels-off and 'the sound of surprise' is 'ner more.
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable, sharp, and among his best
Review: Much like Nietzsche's, Delillo's writing hits hard, blunt truths which may not resonate as you first read them, but seem to subltly speak to something beyond. This is not to say that Delillo is a flagrant cynicist or ironist. I find him way too dry for that. Not that that is a negative statement, in my opinion. Nevertheless, this book promises more than many reviewers gave it credit for. The territory may not be brand-spanking new, but the story is compelling, rather intriguing and has some nice twists in it. Minor characters don't get their due, but the main character provides enough reason to read on and the antagonist (in the looser sense of the word) also serves as a nice tangent from the main vein of the narrative. What continues to compell me about Delillo is his need to depict, as if by camera, what is happening in his novels, through his crisp sentences. His prose is almost geometric, the way it sets up angles and perspective. Almost every sentence is like a cross-section of the culture we live in. Because his novesl are embedded in history, I believe we may be looking back at Delillo in 40, 50, 75 years from now, trying to see "what it was really like" back then. Like a timecapsule in a book.
Rating:
Summary: Slow but not exactly sweet...
Review: Right about the time I polished off "Underworld" for the third time, this new tome by the same author comes along. At just over 200 pages, I figured this would be a quick way to get some more DeLillo under my belt before I tackled any of his early works. I figured wrong. "Underworld", for all it's brilliance, contained numerous dull passages, often of a rather lengthy nature, many of them made dull by seemingly motiveless characters who wandered around performing inexplicable acts of minimal consequence, all in the name of some presumable Big Statement that never coalesced. BUT, and it's a big but (note the caps!), there were a superior number of masterful plot threads that were successfully brought to fruition, and it was these latter threads that not only saved the novel but made it one of the best published in the last ten years (I say this, of course, not having read much genre fiction, but if that's your bag you're probably not reading this review anyway). The problem with "Cosmopolis" can be summed up rather succinctly: it contains all of the drawbacks of "Underworld" without any of the payoffs. The lead character, Eric Packer, never clicks with the reader, even though all the Big Statement elements inherent in this plot are telegraphed way in advance (hell, the stretch limo on the cover just about says it all, and considering DeLillo is no minimalist that's not a good sign). The symbolism of having a disenfranchised ex-executive plotting to assassinate Packer also seems a bit obvious a ploy for someone as skilled in sketching out characters as Delillo. "Cosmopolis" is further burdened by a long laundry list of non-events that make up the plot and offer little resolution; a scene toward the end where Packer bursts into tears at a rapper's funeral seems to come out of nowhere, and nothing in the narrative up to that point has sufficiently illustrated the kind of growing remorse that leads to the inexplicable final quarter of the book. Nonetheless, believeable or not, once it's been made clear that Packer has growned disillusioned with his world to the point of self-destruction, the novel's denouement seems not only obvious but inevitable. All in all, not one of Delillo's finer works. In fact, this is exactly the type of book where you can get a good idea of it's quality from reading reviews. You can never agree with any one critic 100% of the time, but when a universal cross section of write ups all point to the same pros or cons of any given work it's about as good advice as you're going to get prior to reading the book for yourself. Which is indeed recommended, but in the case of Delillo and "Cosmopolis" do yourself a favor and save this one for last.
Rating: 
Summary: Cosmopolis: A Novel
Review: This is absolutly, by far, the worst book I have ever read. I purchased it in Germany at a train station where they did not have many english books to choose from. I should have just stared out the window during the long train ride! It was awful, depressing and just plain odd. The protagonist, Eric Packer is not the least bit interesting. He spends the day driving across Manhatten trying to get his hair cut, he meets various people along the way and has sex with many of them. He is married, but somehow he does not really know he is married. The odd thing is that he keeps running in to his wife when he decides to get out of his limo to get something to eat. How can she get across town when he can't? None of it makes any sense. Don't bother!
Rating:
Summary: Cosmopolis: A Novel
Review: This is absolutly, by far, the worst book I have ever read. I purchased it in Germany at a train station where they did not have many english books to choose from. I should have just stared out the window during the long train ride! It was awful, depressing and just plain odd. The protagonist, Eric Packer is not the least bit interesting. He spends the day driving across Manhatten trying to get his hair cut, he meets various people along the way and has sex with many of them. He is married, but somehow he does not really know he is married. The odd thing is that he keeps running in to his wife when he decides to get out of his limo to get something to eat. How can she get across town when he can't? None of it makes any sense. Don't bother!
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