Cosmopolis (review)

Like De Lillo's last novel, The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis plays tricks with the laws of nature. This eerily brilliant new book unfolds on a single day in April 2000 during which chaos rules. The speed, arrogance, and racy energy noted in the New York of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) have reached dizzy new heights. A water-main break has fouled the theater district with floating debris and mud. Burning cars hiss and spit metal, as the angry protesters who fired them run from policemen carrying billy clubs and riot shields. A man torches himself.

Protest takes different forms, all violent. A bomb goes off near an investment bank in hostile reaction to a shift in the traditional concept of money. "Money has lost its narrative quality," a character notes. No longer an index of the value of goods and services, it now talks to itself. It feeds off itself, too. "The glow of cyber-capital" has both a purity and a weight that bypass questions of purchasing power. Under the new free-market global capitalism, a man will spend $104 million for a forty-eight-room apartment because it defines and energizes him. The question of value for money is irrelevant.

Marx and Engels had it right when they said that capitalism produces its own gravediggers. The book throngs with the deaths of the high and mighty. And the deaths are ugly. The managing director of the International Monetary Fund is shot while appearing live on the Money Channel, "his pulpy face blowing outward in spasms of shock and pain." The owner of Russia's biggest media conglomerate also dies of gunfire. Then a convoy of thirty-five limousines rolls through downtown Manhattan to honor Brutha Fuz, a rap star who has just died, not like Tupac Shakur or Biggie Smalls of bullet wounds, but, more ominously, of natural causes at age seventeen.

All the book's important characters are young, like the book's main figure, twenty-eight-year-old Eric Packer, an "investment banker . . . land developer . . . venture capitalist . . . (and) discount broker." Eric is flourishing at a time when nearly all the other asset managers in the global market have flopped. Besides living in a triplex apartment in the world's tallest residential building, he rides around town in a chauffeured customized thirty-five-foot limo with a cadre of armed bodyguards.

Eric needs their protection because the deals he has been brokering have shut down businesses and put millions out of work. But this financial wizard can't shield himself from the enemy within. Besides suffering from insomnia, he sees things happening on his video screen before they take place. He hasn't yet consummated his marriage of three weeks to a rich socialite.

The simplest acts defeat this overlord of finance. The haircut he sets out to get at the book's outset is finally given him twelve hours later by the ancient barber in Hell's Kitchen who gave him his first haircut at age four. But this descent into his slum origins fails him. Or, more properly, he fails to let it do its healing work. Anxious about the billions he has been losing, he bolts the barber's chair with one side of his head uncut.

His half-haircut evokes his oft-mentioned assymetrical prostate. Eric has been carrying within him the data that's destroying his economic trendspotting, a system built on a consistency between consumer spending, currency trends, and the rumors swirling around financial ministries worldwide.

Defying precedent and probability, the Japanese yen whose decline he has gambled everything on has kept rising. This randomness befits a system gone amok. Eric has lost out to the aesthetics of accident or arrhythmia. Nor, in our cutthroat economy, in which one's capital assets define one's life, does material ruin bring redemption. As Damon Runyon put it, all horse players die broke.

Conveying the frenzy and convulsiveness caused by the loss of symmetry are the intrusions into the actions of rats. These "thematically sound" carriers of lice and typhus pollute everything they touch. It's...