I grabbed Cosmopolis off the library bookshelf for my roommate, Joe, who had considered reading Pynchon but found the task too daunting. I had tried an audiobook of Pynchon, but it came out nonsensical. I knew from reading criticism that DeLillo was the more accessible prolific postmodern writer and maybe a good gateway to Pynchon.
Joe ended up too busy to read a novel, so I read instead (taking another break from IJ). I didn't know it when I started, but I had some strong feelings about DeLillo before I started. I very much liked the film he wrote, Game 6. I very much hate his themes (thanks Wikipedia!).
I thought I had a pretty good idea when Cosmopolis had been published, so I didn't check that. I was off by at least 10 years. This will turn out to be crucial in how I turned on the book.
Cosmopolis is the story of a hedge fund manager, Eric Packer, who falls absolutely over the course of a day. DeLillo has Eric ostensibly wanting to get a haircut all day long. The general plot could be read as a criticism of LTCM and I wouldn't be surprised it if had been inspired by it. As I started the book, assuming it had been written in the late 80s or early 90s, I thought it was a brilliant prediction of things to come. Its 2003 publishing date showed it to be a blechish derivative of events past.
The first thirty or so pages held my interest pretty strongly. It was exactly what I had imagined the writing would be like: jazzy, abstruse, maybe even timelessly hip. But then the characters that inhabited the book coalesced into portraits of actual people. And this is where DeLillo is weak. The ideas behind his characters are interesting in the abstract. His characters in toto are feckless and mundane. The idea of a rich man with different elevators for different purposes caught me, surprised me. The hyper-rich, hyper-successful man having thoughts in the car left me bored.
If I read any more DeLillo, it will be White Noise, but it will probably be with reluctance.
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