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Literary Review
Slapstick shtick
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DeLillo has a reputation for reading the American psyche. But none of his visionary powers comes through in Cosmopolis, says ANITA ROY.
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THE New York Times calls Don DeLillo "one of the most ironic, intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America". His ability to draw deep connections between events, ideas and people has earned him the reputation of being able to read the American psyche like a shaman possessed.
His first novel, Americana (1971), "was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture." The fullest expression of this aim came in 1997 with Underworld, an 827-page epic which, in its language and its structure as much as the stories it interwove, seemed to capture the very essence of Americanness: its rhythms, its fears, its secret heartbeat.
I opened his latest novel with great expectations — and closed it with bewilderment. I am still trying to decide if the whole thing is an elaborate spoof.
The story takes place during one day in April 2000. A multi-billionaire, Eric Packer, drives across Manhattan in his stretch limo to have a haircut. During the course of the day he has in-car meetings with: his currency analyst; his chief of technology; his chief of finance, with whom he has bizarre touchless sex; his doctor, who is giving Packer an anal examination while this is going on; and his chief of theory, whose only job is to smile enigmatically and say things like "The glow of cyber-capital. So radiant and seductive. I understand none of it."
Apart from all this, he also: has sex with three other women, one of whom is an off-duty body-guard who zaps him with her stun gun; watches the assassinations of two captains of industry on his in-car TV screen; is caught up in an anti-globalisation riot; kills his chief bodyguard; has a haircut; meets his own assassin; shoots himself in the hand; and dies. Quite a day.
One of the main ideas in the book is "the interaction between technology and capital. The inseparability." Eric is the living symbol of that inseparability. On the many screens in his car, he tracks international money markets, making and losing unimaginable amounts at the touch of a key. To him, everything is instantly outdated: ATM machines are "so cumbrous and mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated"; and as for gold, it's a form of money "so obsolete Eric didn't know how to think of it." Life is moving so fast, Eric has started seeing things an instant before they happen — reverse déja vu.
In a recent interview, DeLillo says, "I think the curious psychological subtext of the war in Iraq was to return America to its sense of the future, a feeling that had been damaged by the events of September 11. We're using our technological imperative in order to win a struggle that concerns the past and the future. This is not something that's at all overt, but I think the element exists at some level of our exertions against terrorists and the Iraq situation as well. We want to live in the future." The violence unleashed in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly suggests that the battle was for more than oil, the justification greater than just vengeance: the rhetoric of American modernity vs. "medieval" Islam says it all.
This makes it sound like the secular prophet of America's psyche has lost none of his visionary powers. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Early in the book, Eric muses on the streaming stock market reports — in the numerical patterns he discerns organic structures: "birdwing and chambered shell... the data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realised in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative." So far, so (very) good. But when we are finally told — by Packer's killer, no less — that the key to understanding the fluctuations of the yen are to be found in Packer's own asymmetrical prostate, we suspect the writer has disappeared up his own fundament.
DeLillo chucks in another bizarre event in his bizarre day when Packer is attacked — not by the killer whom he's been expecting, but by the "pastry assassin" André Petrescu (modelled on real-life flan-flinger Noel Godin; see www.pieman.org). What are we to make of this slapstick shtick dished up by the writer who is said to possess a "surgical wit so sharp you're laughing so hard you don't realise you're bleeding"?
Everyone should read DeLillo, because at his best, there is none better — but sidestep this aberrant custard-pie of a book and go for Mao II, Libra, White Noise, and Underworld in particular, to appreciate the shaman of the American psyche in full command of his powers.
Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo, Scribner, 2003, p.224, price not stated.
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