Synopsis
Don DeLillo's 13th novel focuses on a 28-year-old billionaire, Eric Packer, on one fateful day in his life. It's April, 2000, and Eric spends most of the day being driven around Manhattan in his limo. From the back seat, he weathers a series of disasters, both economic (the yen is rising when Eric bet on its fall) and local (he and his driver meet up with an anarchist group), commits an act of violence, lunches with his wife but has sex with two other women, and confronts the stalker who is plaguing him. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2006-08-02 | | Narrated by: | Will Patton | | Edition Description: | Unabridged |
Publisher's Note
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end, those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age 28, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral, and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance, and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's 13th novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall.
Industry Reviews
"[B]leakly funny....DeLillo assembles these quirky particulars expertly--and he still writes better sentences than any other contemporary author. The tale is ingenious and amusing, and there's a chilling logic to its eloquent climax...."
Kirkus Reviews (01/01/2003)
"[F]or all the comic and ironic bite DeLillo gets out of skewering New Economy wackiness, he's really dealing with bigger and tougher issues. As Packer's limo fights its way across Manhattan, COSMOPOLIS steers deeper and deeper into both myth and current events. [The novel] strips away any pretense of insulated comfort and replaces it with a curious and heady sense."
Ruminator Review - Matt Konrad
"Like UNDERWORLD, Don DeLillo's new novel is an up-to-the-minute gizmo with a nineteenth-century heart....As with UNDERWORLD, the success of the book hangs on DeLillo's ability to make the old-fashioned heart of his novel animate its postmodern body; and as with UNDERWORLD, this success is compromised by DeLillo's merely theoretical interest in human beings."
New Republic - James Wood (04/14/2003)
"A large part of the very great strength of DeLillo's work is the fact that beneath the martini chill of the writing's surface there is the lather and fizz of a schooner of old-style New York beer....In the stressed-beyond-stress figure of Eric Packer, DeLillo has created a figure horribly representative of our damaged times. COSMOPOLIS may not be the best book that he has written, or is capable of writing, but in these grim days it is probably the best that we can expect."
Bookforum - John Banville
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