Paperback, 224 pages
Published April 2, 2004 by Picador.
"Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.".
"His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to."--BOOK JACKET.
Apathy and confusion! Chaos rules in the name of success which no one could have for there are no more masters, just slaves commanding slaves. The system wins, whatever that means. Social forces win, whatever that means. Symbols win, whatever that means.
Since his magnum opus [book:Underworld], Delillo's books ([book:The Body Artist], [book:Cosmopolis]) have been short, controlled, and meditative. Cosmopolis possesses the kind of deft masculine wit and postmodern sexuality and philosophy that I so love about Delillo's writing, but it also has a weight of dark introspection to it that I don't feel always works out to have quite the impact that he may have struggled for. I enjoyed much of the book, but the pace never quite caught me up in it, and the ending felt anti-climactic. Which may or may not have been his purpose.
