Rating: 
Summary: Bleakly uninspired
Review: Eric Parker, 28 years old and a billionaire asset manager, is on his way across Manhattan in his luxurious white stretch limo to get his hair cut. He's also betting against the yen. While he loses catastrophic amounts of money, he is visited en route by various advisers of the financial and technological scene, as well as by a physician (who confirms his nagging fears: his prostate is asymmetrical). He also makes several stops along the way, sometimes in order to rendezvous with his wife of three weeks, Elise Shifrin, the poetess (who, incidentally, keeps popping up in unexpected places), sometimes in order to have sex with various other women. His progress is halted at first by a presidential procession, later by a disastrous political demonstration, and finally by a dead rapper's funeral. As the day progresses into evening and Eric's situation becomes more and more unglued, he witnesses events on his spycam before they actually occur. Then he learns from his primary bodyguard, Torval, that there is a credible threat against his person. A famous pastry stalker nails him in the face with a pie. He takes part in a scene involving hundreds of nude people being filmed for a movie. The more he loses, the freer he feels, leading him to set himself up for his own surreal meltdown. Post-modern is the word that popped into my mind as I read COSMOPOLIS, except that DeLillo doesn't quite manage to pull off post-modern. While this book wasn't as bad as I expected after reading some of the other reviews, it was still remarkably flat, toneless. A typical slice of conversation: "Yes. But I'm feeling a change. I'm making a change. Did you look at the menu? They have green tea ice cream. This is something you might like. People change. I know what's important now." Eric is a one-dimensional guy and his mental ramblings, as succinct as they may be, don't convey much of a sense of anything. While the theme -- the chaotic and unconformed will prevail -- is highlighted in a somewhat amusing manner (by the asymmetrical prostate, nonetheless), and while several portions of the book -- the burning man, the conversation during the doctor's examination, and the entire last chapter -- were sufficiently unsettling to cause me to think twice about them, my overall impression is of a forced, uninspired tale with dead details, dreadful dialogue, and cardboard characters. But the prose, at least, was above ordinary, unaffected and remote. And the ending actually worked -- enough so that I wish I could give this book three and a half stars instead of just three. Impressive, COSMOPOLIS is certainly not. But there are enough (albiet faint) flashes of brilliance in this uncomfortably sterile book that I'm going to look up DeLillo's older work, and, if you haven't already, I can suggest you do so too.
Rating: 
Summary: Cross-town traffic
Review: It sounds like a recipe for the great American novel - New York City, pre-9/11, high finance, technology, greed & chaos, and all of it filtered through the prism of Don Delillo. So what went wrong? "Cosmopolis" should, by all means, be standing along side "White Noise", "Libra", and "Mao II" as a timeless literary achievement but sadly it falls beside Delillo's last novel - "The Body Artist" - as a ponderous dud. That's not to say "Cosmopolis" is without poetic passages - a handful at best - but they come too few and far between to recommend the book as a whole. The story in a nutshell - a billionaire takes a long days journey into night to get a haircut. The limo ride across town becomes a revolving door of characters punctuated by countless stops along the way - meals, bookstore browsing, a presidential motorcade, sex, a pop stars funeral, an eco-terrorist/suicide demonstration and a sea of naked movie extras. The situations become more and more absurd by the page and the dialogue remains stilted throughout. Imagine "American Psycho" as written by Samuel Beckett. The overwhelming sense of boredom and disillusionment that permeates the book is so potent, readers are at risk of being infected to the point they become bored and disillusioned with Delillo himself. The book feels superficial and hollow - much like the stretch limo on it's cover - and perhaps there are deeper meanings buried within, but good luck finding them through all that surface glare. One may begin to wonder if Delillo hasn't already shot his last fertile load with the massive "Underworld" - but wait we must for his next stab at greatness to see if this is the case. Like "The Body Artist" before it, "Cosmopolis" is a very short book but a very long read. Look for it on remainder tables in record time.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow
Review: Don DeLillo again shows that he's our best novelist of American absurdity with this strange off-kilter comedy that centers around the events of an eventful day in Manhattan. Against a backdrop of raves, a Presidential motorcade, a rock star's funeral, mysterious street demonstrations and the constant, ghostly electronic feed of news of pending financial disaster, a young billionaire asset manager limousines uptown to get a haircut in order to embrace his sense of inevitable, personal apocalypse. DeLillo's writing is outstanding, funny with a cool lyricism, poetic when you least expect it. His imagistic tilling of the semiotic field yields the sort of endless irony that makes for the kind of truly subversive comedy, a sort of satire that contains the straining cadences of prophecy. The city, the place where the the hydra-headed strands of commerce, history, technology and government merge in startling combinations of applied power, becomes an amorphous cluster of symbols whose life and vitality come to seem as fragile and short-lived as living matter itself. A major novel by one of our great literary artists.
Rating:
Summary: could have been so much better
Review: After a year passed since I read The Body Artist, I started anticipating what Don DeLillo would write next. While I found The Body Artist to be somewhat of a disappointment, this is still the writer who thrilled me with White Noise and The Names. This is the man who wrote the incredibly beautiful prologue to Underworld. DeLillo can flat out Write. The basic plot of Cosmopolis follows Eric Packer, a 28 year old billionaire, as he crosses New York City (pre 9/11) in his limo to get a haircut. Such a simple trip takes all day since the President is in town and there is marches, riots and a funeral. At the same time, Packer is told that someone is out to kill him. Confused? Don't worry, DeLillo uses plot as a device to enable him to riff on aspects of society and while the characters do not sound like real people, it is the characters the provide the interest and pacing of the narrative. In Cosmopolis, DeLillo takes on high finance and the lives of the ultra-rich. DeLillo's view is very comic and deeply scathing as he reveals how shallow these lives really are. As talented as Don DeLillo is as a writer, this was not a very engaging novel. While plot and character are merely devices for DeLillo (instead of being the point), in a better novel this is not a problem and would barely be noticeable. The fact is that all of the characters sound the same and given a different name would be identical to the other characters. There is very little distinction between characters. This is not unusual for DeLillo, but again, in a better novel I wouldn't be thinking about that. Cosmopolis is a step back in the right direction for DeLillo (after the awful novel The Body Artist), but would still only fall in the middle of his body of work. This is a middle tier novel from a top tier talent.
Rating:
Summary: a challenge and a pleasure
Review: There are a lot of people who say that DeLillo doesn't create characters, but rather automatons that spit out obscure theses. These are the same people that think that Platonic dialogues are about what Plato thought rather than what Athens was. DeLillo's characters are not mouthpieces; the ideas these characters voice are indications of the ordering -- or disordering -- of their souls. Like Plato, DeLillo is probing the emotional life of ideas. Eric Packer, the protagonist, is the epitome of the class of get-rich-quick internet tycoons that came about in the 90s. What marks him as a member of this class is his faith in the power of information technology to predict the future and thus make the future bend to the will of the present. His lusts and manias are a diagnosis of a certain overreaching mindset from which we have not entirely freed ourselves. However, what distinguishes Eric from his class is that his faith in information technology amounts to being a real religious devotion. Eric is a continuation of DeLillo's investigation into modern manifestations of the desire for religious trascendence. To paraphrase DeLillo, when the old God leaves the world, what happens to all the leftover faith? Eric clings to computer screens the way people once clung to holy texts. In his delusion, he experiences information as a communion with the whole of reality as such: reading a computer screen, he thinks, "Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole." But he is also a sort of Oedipus. He does not know who he is. His turn towards technology is a way of escaping something in himself, a past that haunts him. In the end, the book is a story about a man losing his faith and rediscovering, for better and for worse, all the things from which his faith was an escape. To be sure, this novel is not for everyone. For one thing, DeLillo never really decides whether he wants his fiction to be placed in a realistic or theoretical landscape -- is this our world or some imagined, symbolic world? Perhaps in 50 years we will thank him for refusing to make such a distinction, but for now, the book strains one's ability and willingness to become attuned to it. At the same time, he is moving away from the Joycean lushness of his earlier style towards a Beckettian starkness that many readers will find taxing. Nevertheless, the book is special for refusing to be what a book is supposed to be. Like the later experimental work of John Coltrane, Cosmopolis is at once exhausting and invigorating.
Rating:
Summary: Gone off the tracks
Review: This book is, quite simply, not good. End Zone, White Noise and Underworld are all truly amazing works that show an author at the peak of his powers. Cosmopolis, like The Body Artist, smacks of an experiment gone awry. Suprisingly for someone as iconoclastic as Delillo, he seems to have fallen into an all-too-familiar trap. After the breakthrough success of Underworld, he has begun writing in a new style, apparently feeling like he's done all he can with his previous style. I can only hope Delillo abandons this experiment soon.
Rating: 
Summary: Payback time for JFK... DeLillo takes on Gordon Gecko
Review: I wonder... was this DeLillo's "Wall Street" in exchange for Stone's "Libra"? This much, however, is almost certain: an author ought not take himself more seriously than his subject matter. More parenthetically speaking, if this is a book about a visionary whose genius leads him to inevitable self-destruction, then the protagonist does far, far too much talking for a sage. A rather un-profound philosopher.
Rating:
Summary: Hummmmmmmmm...
Review: In short: a very bad book by a very good writer.
Rating:
Summary: New take on an old (unreadable) story
Review: Only 10 pages had turned before the gorgonzola was rolling around in my gob again, three years since it went in, and I pondered how the only thing worse than reading James Joyce is reading other writers trying to write like James Joyce. On one April day in 2000 I sat in Davy Byrne's pub on Dublin's Duke Street, sharing a gorgonzola sandwich with the ghost of Leopold Bloom and chasing Joyce's "ineluctable modality of the visible," which was invisible. Perhaps it was the Liffey fog or the Guinness. And, by the hazy way, I was proudly becoming one of only 74 people worldwide who have actually finished "Ulysses," an experimental story based on an ancient story. Don DeLillo is apparently another. His new odyssey-come-lately, "Cosmopolis," is an ode to Joyce in a new key, but an old cant. It resonates with the same disjunctive, unsettling rhythm of Joyce's 1922 novel, but lacks the texture, orality and genuine humanity. But take heart: It's easier to read -- DeLillo is a consummate master of poetic language -- and it's shorter by hundreds of pages. DeLillo's cast of characters rivals Joyce's, too. Packer's day begins when he bumps into his newlywed bride of 22 days, an aloof poet-heiress, in traffic. He continues his odyssey with various paramours and business advisers (and sometimes the line between them is very vague, indeed), a doctor who examines his asymmetrical prostate in the backseat of the limo, his stump-necked security chief who worries an assassin lurks around every corner and ... well, an assassin lurking around the corner. Compare and contrast: Joyce's hero, advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, sets out across Dublin on a June day in 1904, a deliberate spoof of mythology wrapped in social realism. "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries," James Joyce once crowed about "Ulysses." That didn't stop Aldous Huxley from calling it "one of the dullest books ever written." One college English professor described his time with "Ulysses" this way: "It was like having a rib ripped out of my body, being beaten with it, raped with it, and then being forced to eat it." So why regurgitate this book based upon the most familiar story in human history, Homer's Odyssey? While it helps to know the Joyce's "Ulysses" was intended to be a comedy -- albeit a "comedy" only in the tragic Irish sense of the word -- it is one of the most famous books never read. Comes now Don DeLillo, a National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner winner, with his redux of a redux of an endlessly redone original. DeLillo is no Joyce, which is probably good. He's also no Vonnegut, whose four- and five-dimensional characters are far more engaging and intimate as they traverse similar parallel universes. DeLillo is pushing the hidebound limits of commercial fiction in 2003 much the same as Joyce did 80 years ago. For that, he deserves praise. "Cosmopolis" is nothing if not challenging, thought-provoking and utterly different. One hopes DeLillo wrote it as a comedy, too. But there is simply no single significant character who engages the reader. Every one is emotionally armored, self-absorbed, insane or seemingly incapable of redemption. Packer is promiscuous, greedy, selfish, brusque, dishonest and cold -- and those are his good qualities. On the other hand, if you are among the other 73 readers, besides me, who actually survived Joyce's "Ulysses," you will grasp the far deeper contexts and mysteries of "Cosmopolis" than the poor mope who finds it under "Foreign Exchange Markets" in the library card file and thinks it's an international money thriller.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly DeLillo's funniest
Review: Ignore the silly critics. They simply don't get DeLillo. Or they've only discovered him through his recent "serious" novels, like the overrated "Underworld". "Cosmopolis" is probably his funniest novel since "Great Jones Street". And to those who complain that it's lacking in "insight", I'd say you're expecting sociology from the wrong man. DeLillo has never purported to be a philosopher or a scientist; but he has mined their worlds for comedy and rendered it in language that turns jargon into poetry. He is, if anything, a mock-philosopher. Anyone who didn't laugh out loud at parts of "Cosmopolis" obviously failed to (as Anthony Burgess advised readers of "Finnegans Wake") "take off the mask of solemnity and prepare to be entertained." If you think any reader of Wired ca. 1995 could have produced "Cosmopolis", you're obviously not paying attention to DeLillo.
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