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