Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's 13th novel. His reputation as one of the most provocative and
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innovative of American writers is assured, thanks to such books as Underworld and Americana, but this new outing is as likely to challenge the author's legion of admirers as much as it will exhilarate them--and there's nothing wrong with that. DeLillo's protagonist this time is a well-heeled American, Eric Packer, who sets out one eventful day for a haircut. Gazing through the windows of his white limousine (and availing himself of its state-of-the-art technology), this self-made millionaire takes in the spectacle of financiers being murdered, the funeral of a rapper and some violent anti-globalisation protests. As we come to know DeLillo's anti-hero, we realise that Eric Packer is by no means the most ingratiating of individuals. Cheating on his new wife, he specialises in using people in a cynical and exploitative way. And as this self-serving captain of industry takes an ever-more dangerous journey through a bizarrely rendered New York, it's inevitable that comparisons with Tom Wolfe's classic Bonfire of the Vanities will spring to mind. Resemblances of plot aside, however, the book is a very different animal. Wolfe's narrative had the epic spread of a latter-day War and Peace, whereas DeLillo sharpens and condenses his prose in Cosmopolis to produce an altogether more concise novel. There are two ways to approach Cosmopolis: as a rudely pointed dissection of the American Dream, or as a surreal, symbolic (and disturbing) road trip. This is not a comforting book, but a bracing and caustic one. --Barry Forshaw
Underworld - Don DeLillo
While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of
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the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that "swerve from evenness" in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying. Underworld opens with a breathlessly graceful prologue set during the final game of the Giants-Dodgers pennant race in 1951. Written in what DeLillo calls "super-omniscience" the sentences sweep from young Cotter Martin as he jumps the gate to the press box, soars over the radio waves, runs out to the diamond, slides in on a fast ball, pops into the stands where J. Edgar Hoover is sitting with a drunken Jackie Gleason and a splenetic Frank Sinatra, and learns of the Soviet Union's second detonation of a nuclear bomb. It's an absolutely thrilling literary moment. When Bobby Thomson hits Branca's pitch into the outstretched hand of Cotter--the "shot heard around the world"--and Jackie Gleason pukes on Sinatra's shoes, the events of the next few decades are set in motion, all threaded together by the baseball as it passes from hand to hand. "It's all falling indelibly into the past," writes DeLillo, a past that he carefully recalls and reconstructs with acute grace. Jump from Giants Stadium to the Nevada desert in 1992, where Nick Shay, who now owns the baseball, reunites with the artist Kara Sax. They had been brief and unlikely lovers 40 years before, and it is largely through the events, spinoffs, and coincidental encounters of their pasts that DeLillo filters the Cold War experience. He believes that "global events may alter how we live in the smallest ways," and as the book steps back in time to 1951, over the following 800-odd pages, we see just how those events alter lives. This reverse narrative allows the author to strip away the detritus of history and pop culture until we get to the story's pure elements: the bomb, the baseball and the Bronx. In an epilogue as breathless and stunning as the prologue, DeLillo fast-forwards to a near future in which ruthless capitalism, the Internet, and a new, hushed faith have replaced the Cold War's blend of dread and euphoria. Through fragments and interlaced stories--including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others--DeLillo creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life, wonderfully distilled. --Amazon.com
Advantages: Comic, perceptive novel from one of the finest living writers in the English language Disadvantages: None for this particular reader!
...The foundations for DonDeLillo's reputation as one of America's most important contemporary novelists were established with 'Underworld', his sprawling black comedy about the threat of nuclear conflict. Having progressed from such anonymity to make this emphatic impression on British bookshelves, it was a natural reaction for some of the more cynical reviewers to doubt his ability to sustain these high standards but these concerns were firmly dismissed with 'White Noise' (winner of the 1985 American Book Award). The tremendous response that DeLillo received led to him being catapulted from relative obscurity onto the American academic reading lists, a place unattainable by the darling of the 1960s literati, Thomas Pynchon. One of the endearing qualities present in DeLillo's novels is that his focus does not lie with an overbearing...
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Advantages: unusual viewpoint, well written Disadvantages: slow start, quite depressing
...I bought this book a couple of years ago, and after a couple of false starts I have just recently read it from cover to cover. Previously, I’ve given up on it a chapter or so in as I found the start somewhat slow. However, it is worth persevering, three or four chapters in and this becomes a book that you just want to get home to read.
Basically this is the story of post modern American family life, narrated by Jack Gladney, who is a lecturer in Hitler Studies at the local university. He lives in happy chaos with Babette and several children from previous marriages. This all sounds fairly cheerful on the surface of it, but the book is darkly humourous and in some ways deeply depressing. DeLillo portrays a modern world where TV is ever present, families eat dinner from fast food restaurants in their car and an “airborne toxic event...
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Advantages: A vast plot-driven novel,thrilling and action-packed, part of a projected trilogy. Disadvantages: Difficult writing 1950s style, perhaps requires some background historical knowledge.
...to the double-dealing we see in modern politics. All in all, I thought Tabloid was a brilliant exploration of the corruption of the top men in any walk of life, written in an accurate '50s slang style but not without references to current issues. This novel is the first of the 'Underworld USA' trilogy which continues with The Cold Six Thousand and spans twenty or thirty years of US history. Anyone who likes other crime novelists like Carl Hiaasen or Ellroy's earlier LA crime novels will admire the scope and bravery of this book. The projected trilogy will no doubt have similarities to DonDeLillo's 'Underworld.' This is generic crime writing taken as far as possible....
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12.01.2003
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