Thursday, May 15, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Parallel dystopia

By John Ziebell

I was halfway through Don DeLillo's 13th novel, Cosmopolis, when someone asked if I liked it. "Sure," I said. What's not to like? Well, to be honest, plenty: the characters, their dialogue, the obviously stagey epic formula that frames it. ... The better question might be this: What do we want from Don DeLillo?

Remember that DeLillo's books have never claimed to be easy. Remember also that in terms of style, persona and voice, he has never been the same writer twice. His new novel is constructed around a day in the life of Eric Packer, a 28-year-old icon of the '90s stock market boom. Packer, a billionaire, lives in a 48-room apartment with a shark tank, lap pool and two elevators--one synched to the music of oddball French composer Erik Satie, the other timed to the strains of Sufi rap. We know trivia--he has an asymmetrical prostate, for instance, and has used chaos theory to figure out the international money trading market. On an April morning in 2000, Packer begins a journey across Manhattan with two apparent purposes: to ride out a seemingly suicidal bet against the rising price of the yen and to get his hair cut.

It's easy to recognize the anti-epic signposts that mark the turf DeLillo is covering here. The protagonist represents everything that, say, Aeneas did not. The dialogue seems, at times, as stilted as Homer's might. The plot reprises Ulysses, not The Odyssey; but the bit players are eminently more banal, and the quirky, contradictory and eventually endearing qualities of Leopold Bloom are replaced with...well, maybe that's part of the problem.

We're not supposed to like Eric Packer. We can't bond lovingly with a guy who has an in-house playground for his borzois and his white stretch limo that's been "prousted"--lined with cork, like the work space of another unique French fin-de-siecle talent. Not even his wife, who he meets occasionally on his crosstown journey, likes him much. He's not a character but an archetype, as are the aides who report to him throughout his journey. The string of experts who step in and out of his limo as it crawls through a series of traffic jams--directors of finance and security and technology and "theory"--are manifestations, not people; conjoined, they represent the ethos that can not only spawn but idealize a guy like Packer. They speak in jargon-cluttered sentences that are either nonsensical or encoded with deeply metaphysical nuance--and there's no telling which.

While DeLillo may not make his protagonist appealing, he does grant Packer a travelogue rich with seemingly random encounters to provide plenty of insightful moments. He's a window through which we view the representative world in all its glorious decay--the bums and ostentatious displays of wealth, anti-globalization protests and rapper funerals, the consumers and gangsters and poets and Hassidim that comprise the polis of the Ideal City: "Even here, in the huddle of old cultures, tactile and closely woven, with passersby mixed in, and wandering fools, people did not touch each other."

As always, detail stands out in DeLillo's writing, the brilliant vignettes that catch the eye as they swim up through the sometimes opaque but always lyrical sea of language; seeing a man in women's clothes walking six dogs, or watching a protester immolate himself--a singular vision that not only provides cultural referents but neatly foreshadows Packer's future once we realize that self-immolation, in a fiscal and, increasingly, a more physical sense, is his agenda for the day.

The fact that he's doomed and glad of it doesn't bother us too much; nor do amorphous characters and elliptical dialogue. What may give some readers pause is that Packer--and the plot he inhabits--lacks plausible motivation. Allegory and analogy are both measured on the merits of the comparisons they make, not the wishes they fulfill; perhaps the best way to illustrate the notion that a society's cultural train has overrun its rails is to create a parallel world that's just as unguided.

The day's journey seems disjointed, but DeLillo's world does finally make sense, even if the one it mirrors does not. He pulls it together masterfully, with not a little elegance, and it's a pleasant surprise. What's undeniable is the author's consummate narrative skill, and when a novel prevails by securing at least the admiration of even its most resistant readers, what more can we demand?