Cosmopolis

 

The novel is like a two-act play, opening in the year 2000, on ‘a day in April’. It anticipates the Global Financial Crisis more than responding directly to 9/11 (the novel was published in 2003) in that the critique is of western capitalism, rather than American foreign policy. This said, the simplified world-view of Eric Packer is part of the wider geopolitical and economic problem.

In Part One, we meet Packer – a man of twenty-eight who appears to be at the height of his powers as an uber-rich investor with a forty-eight room apartment and an heiress wife he hardly seems to know. Packer’s power is pharaoh-like – outside of his house, he is enthroned in a stretch limousine, where employees and doctors are summoned. Packer asks childlike questions that could be profound were he interested in the answers; rather he is a man of rat-like intelligence that so far has allowed him to crush and win. Now doubt, for some reason, has entered his world and in the course of a day, he unravels. This downfall is foreshadowed in Part One by the ‘Confessions of Benno Levin’ – a stage-name for a deranged and bitter former employee. In the meantime, we see the anarchy of anti-globalism protests, which culminates in a protester immolating himself. Here Packer criticises the act for its lack of originality, as an ‘appropriation’ of the earlier self-sacrifice of Vietnamese monks (p.101). This is an intellectual rather than felt response, and is typical of Packer's android-like intelligence. 

Part Two begins with Packer and one of his employees (‘She wore her ZyloFlex body armour while they had sex’ [p.111]). He visits a nightclub, witnesses the tremendous funeral procession of a rapper, shoots his head of security, has half a haircut in the poor neighbourhood where he grew up, joins a movie set where hundreds of people lie naked on the streets, and then seeks out danger in the abandoned building where ‘Benno Levin’ (Richard Sheets) lives. As in other points of the story, Packer converses with Sheets/Levin about capitalism and the world – but again, he gives his potential assassin no credit (‘The crime you want to commit is a cheap imitation [p.193]).

Like End Zone, and White Noise, there is a terrifying extension of worldly logic in the setting of the text and the psychology of the characters. In Cosmopolis there is also a dreamlike state in which men whorl rats, screens flicker with events that are yet to happen, Packer takes whichever woman is on hand, and pointlessly shoots a hole in his own hand with an ancient weapon. Losing money is as much a crime as making it, Sheets asserts, and Packer seems intent to stroll into danger and death when he has all the advantages to survive (and no doubt, to continue to thrive). That he lacks any moral purpose seems to be part of the point: a young man (or culture) on the verge of self-imposed collapse. ‘He is dead inside the crystal of his watch’ (like a digital foretelling) writes DeLillo, ‘but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound’ (p.209). That sentiment could be cultural, as well as individual, as we all brace for the impact of our actions, rebounded.