Don DeLillo: Cosmopolis

Reviewed by MICHAEL LARSEN

Delillo's latest offering tracks billionaire Eric Michael Packer as he wends his way across New York City in search of a haircut.

While this objective may sound like the folly of the rich, especially as he has chosen a day where that city is even more clogged than usual, in fact Packer's choice of destination ends up telling us a lot about who he is.

Which is good, for he is a man who gives little away, and DeLillo's almost surgically pared writing style doesn't lend itself to lengthy character descriptions.

What this 209-page novel does attempt to do, through Packer and his journey and his ultimate fate, is try to cast some light on humanity in the 21st century. A big ask of a small book.

By detailing Packer's actions as he encounters a globalisation riot, a black rapper's cortege and a presidential motorcade, and threading in a threat on his life that becomes more credible by the hour, DeLillo masterfully builds tension as he informs.

Packer's crises come from too much of everything rather than too little - too much money, too many options, too much available ready-to-wear pleasure. And while the city stimulates, excites and perplexes, Packer can't feel part of it.

He seems to want nothing more than to live a little, to feel some physical sensation, to experience things as they are rather than allegorically or second-hand. So he engineers his own downfall.

He buys yen in globe-destabilising amounts - he has that much power and money - and against all advice continues to do so, initially because he believes the beautiful mathematical patterns of currency will validate his actions, and when they don't, he does it for the thrill of it.

The logical extension of business is murder, DeLillo tells us, and Packer engages in some of that too, along with some cold meetings with his new wife, a very sexually tense discussion with one of hisc advisers while receiving an anal probe from his doctor, all the while watching the world and himself on multi-screens in the limo.

Meanwhile, a disgruntled former employee of his lives out a meagre, homeless existence, faced with the same questions - what is a valid life? The realisation of Benno Levin, told to us in his own words, is that he must kill Packer to be real.

Packer's trek - last stop, the haircut in the old Italian district where he grew up - brings him closer to his assassin, until he eventually forces a face-to-face meeting with his nemesis.

Anyone who expected another Underworld will be rudely awakened. However, concise in time-frame, concise in word-count and taut in its approach to the big questions, Cosmopolis is a great book. Anyone else tackling themes such as personal isolation in a cosmopolitan city would come across as trite, but DeLillo is so self-assured and so inspirationally intelligent that the stimulation of your cortex and your conscience continue for days after you close the book. Strangely brilliant.

Picador $37.95

* Michael Larsen is an Auckland freelance writer.