© Arun Sreenivasan Reading Don Delillo’s 'Cosmopolis' during social and financial uncertainty

At a time of political and social volatility, jittery financial markets, and widespread protests, a novel written almost two decades ago has some rather prescient observations to make. Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis met with decidedly mixed reviews when it was published in 2003, but it can be rewarding to re-read it now in the context of all that has happened since.

There’s little doubt that Cosmopolis comes across as odd. In a New Yorker review, John Updike commented on its lack of empathy, adding that “the trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens”. More savagely, Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times that it was hokey and contrived, “a major dud, as lugubrious and heavy-handed as a bad Wim Wenders film, as dated as an old issue of Interview magazine”. (The 2011 film version by David Cronenberg was somewhat better received.)

In retrospect, such critical judgments seem over-egged. Certainly, Don DeLillo’s thirteenth novel is not among his better works, but many of its perceptions remain relevant. All the more remarkable considering that the book’s setting is pre-9/11 Manhattan, and it was written well before the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2011 Zuccotti Park Occupy Movement.

On the surface, Cosmopolis deals with a day in the life of Eric Packer, a filthy rich asset manager in his late twenties who, upon waking up in his palatial Manhattan high-rise, decides that he needs a haircut. (A cheeky and obvious link to one of the novel’s refrains of financial devaluation.) Packer is existentially connected to characters in films such as Wall Street, The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street, being monomaniacal about multiplying money. In his amorality, he can even be seen as allied to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.

Spectral and predatory planet

Seated in his spacious and technologically advanced stretch limo, he asks to be driven to a barbershop, ignoring the advice of a security officer who worries about heavy traffic because of a presidential visit. The limo stutters across town and on the way, Packer has a rendezvous with his wife, a liaison with another woman, and meetings with medical and company officials. He witnesses a violent and prolonged anti-capitalist protest, attends the funeral of a beloved Sufi rap star, and is targeted by a “pastry assassin”. All along, he bets against the rise of the yen until he meets his nemesis, a disgruntled ex-employee.

The characters come across as shifting ciphers, not intended to be real in a novelistic sense, and on many occasions, the dialogue is arch, if not stiff. Though there is much to dislike, there is also much to chew on. DeLillo’s satiric, sometimes parodic, skills are on full display, wrapped in a cool, detached style that can make him sound like a dispassionate prophet.

The planet of Cosmopolis is spectral and predatory. “I think you acquire information and turn it into something stupendous and awful,” Packer’s wife tells him, not entirely in disapproval. The interaction, even inseparability, between technology and capital is seen as a worthwhile objective. Numbers and charts are “the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets”. The yen rises and falls in a thrumming pulse against a backdrop of commerce and crowds, twin forces that “shape every anecdotal moment”.

In this society of the spectacle, violence and even death are seen as casual and inconsequential. At one point, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund is assassinated live on the Money Channel, and Packer expects that the awful scene will now be screened repeatedly until the sensation drains out of it.

Further musings follow, some by Packer’s “chief of theory”. Property, she tells him, is no longer about power, personality and display; the only thing that matters is the price. As for time, it’s a corporate asset: “It belongs to the free market system. The present…is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future of uncontrolled markets and huge investment potential.”

Outside the limo, protests start to rage. Store windows are smashed, policemen assaulted, and masked figures toss smoke bombs, almost like a scene from Todd Phillips’s Joker. Inside, discussions continue on the nature of the people who create frenzy and mass convulsions, “driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over”. Yet, they too are a part of market culture, invigorating and perpetuating the system they rail against.

Paranoid school of American fiction

As the vehicle and the novel progress, currencies tumble and banks fail. Packer dreams of living “in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void”. Not so different from the dreams of some techno-futurists today. With typical bravado, he plans to extend the human experience “toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment”.

Packer gets his comeuppance, experiencing the tics and frailties of the human body and the consequences of raw, unmediated experience. DeLillo’s vision, however, appears bleak, if not nihilistic. The forces that have generated Packer’s world are overwhelming, a far cry from a quieter time of empathy and genuine striving.

DeLillo was once famously referred to as “chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction”. With Cosmopolis, events seem determined to prove his vision right.

Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.