Parts were really good and parts were trying too hard. I liked the business exec riding around in his limo; the journal of the assassin was lame; the climax couldn't have possibly felt more rigged and is way too similar to White Noise's ending. Delillo writes great postmodern dialogue but his narration rides a tenuous line between overwrought cliche and lyrical. ( )

A major stumble from an otherwise excellent writer. ( )

What does anyone imagine? A hundred things a minute. Whether I imagine a thing or not, it's real to me. I have syndromes where they're real, from Malaysia for example...

I liked this book. It took place in one day. A 'Master of the Universe' kind of guy, Eric, just goes bonkers. I like reading about people who lose it and he lost it in a weird and wonderful way. DeLillo just had this annoying habit of throwing in a sentence on every other page to show how clever he is and I would read these and think, 'yeah, whatever... you're clever', and then get on with the story. This could have been a near perfect book if he hadn't tried to be so clever. These sentences took away from the momentum. They were distracting. He seemed to ease off towards the end to make me happy, I think.

Eric himself is a complete asshole but he surrounds himself with interesting people. His wife is crazy in a cute way.

Overall I'd say this was a strange, slightly surreal book worth the time to read. The fact that Eric could see himself on the video monitors doing things before he actually did them left me wondering... The book was also witty. I liked these passages:

'All these limos, my god, that you can't tell one from another.'...
'That I'm a powerful person who chooses not to demarcate his territory with singular driblets of piss is what? Is something I need to apologize for?'
'I want to go home and tongue-kiss my Maxima.'

'I noticed the toilet. It's one of the first things I noticed. What happens to your waste?'
'There's a hole below the fixture. I knocked a hole in the floor. Then I positioned the toilet so that one hole fits over the other.'
'Holes are interesting. There are books about holes.'
'There are books about shit...' ( )

I was pleasantly surprised, upon completing this book, to find that I had had an enjoyable Don DeLillo experience, for it had been awhile. 'Underworld' didn't hit me in the right place, and 'The Body Artist' seemed forced. I confess I felt near to giving up on him for awhile, but I'm relieved that I didn't.

'Cosmopolis' reminded me of the searing power that Mr. DeLillo wields. More than any other author I've read, his words are bursting at the seams. He makes them do things they were not meant to do. They are the cracked and smoldering surface of a river of lava, barely concealing the molten flow. Or, more poetically put, they are a viciously overstuffed burrito. He heats them to glowing, wrenches them around, and douses them, leaving them frozen into shapes they were never meant to attain.

So yeah, there's a lot of that. There is a lot of DeLilloesque dialogue, surprisingly, which has always been my least favorite thing, and the reason I didn't enjoy 'The Body Artist' very much. The characters talk over and around each other in a way that is, for me, neither realistic nor of artistic or entertainment value. But it's kept to a minimum here.

It's really a novella more than a novel, but the amount of apocalyptic dread he is able to create in such a short space is impressive.

Many people seem to be fiercely critical of DeLillo, but I believe that is less a function of how he writes as it is the mystique that has been created around him. Approached as God's gift to late 20th century fiction, as some sort of sorcerer that summoned demons in a pentagram to help him channel 'Pafko At the Wall,' as some untouchable scion of literature--you will likely find him disappointing. Approached as merely a very skilled contemporary fiction writer, you will probably enjoy more what he has to offer.

mhaaa, disappointing ( )