Fiction New York investor and ace money man Eric Parker is so rich he is almost insane, and is certainly miserable. Home is a 48-room apartment; he keeps Borzoi hounds in a cage, owns a second World War bomber and patrols the city in a fully furnished stretch limo that seems as vast as an ocean liner.
From his giant car, he stage-manages his financial empire, watches television, has his medical check-ups and conducts his assignations. Sex is a physical workout session, and he works out a lot. Parker has bodyguards, crazed female staff ready to talk dirty, and Elise, a new wife, who is also fantastically wealthy, possibly beautiful and clearly as weird as he is.
So far, so kind of good. This is a very odd book, with a narrative that reads like an improvised script and a message as bleak as a morgue. All the characters are method actors - tense, on guard and mostly primed for violence. The dialogue is deadpan, disconnected and at times, abruptly, appallingly funny. DeLillo's preoccupation is the violence of a society obsessed by money and gadgets. It is a world with no rules; this is the US in hell.
Part grotesque parable, part surreal comedy, Cosmopolis, set over the course of one nightmare day, is both satire and cartoon. The ruthless Parker is a monster, a rich brat who can't sleep. At 28, he has already gone through a number of crazes, digesting information quickly and storing it computer-wise before moving on for more kicks.
Currently, his major obsession is his prostate: it is examined daily and is declared "asymmetrical". Remember this fact, it may prove significant. Parker appears to know this organ rather better than he knows Elise, a wannabe poet who drifts through the city, usually materialising shortly after Parker has just had sex with someone else. His denials provide him with some entertainment, which is good as his life is horrific, reduced as it is to watching replays of assassinations on his car television.
After two weeks of marriage, during which no intimacy has yet occurred, Elise, while briefly sharing her car with Parker, makes a staggering discovery: "Your eyes are blue."
This causes some reaction in Parker: "He lifted her hand and held it to his face, smelling and licking. The Sikh at the wheel was missing a finger. Eric regarded the stub, impressive, a serious thing, a body ruin that carried history and pain."
This observation is followed by Parker asking Elise: "Eat breakfast yet?" On they drift, she vague and disconnected, he restless, if intent on quasi-courting her before heading for sex to Didi Fancher, long-standing mistress number one, who reckons he needs to buy a Rothko. His answer could be described as revealing.
"What about the chapel?"
"What about it?"
"I've been thinking about the chapel."
"You can't buy the goddamn chapel."
"How do you know? Contact the principals."
On it surges, cryptic, strange and increasingly dangerous.
In the opening paragraph, DeLillo appears to be pitching for some quasi-Shakespearean sympathy for Parker, soon to emerge as a caricature lonely anti-hero of some complexity:
Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five. What did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences not words.
In ways DeLillo is working within the tormented psyche territory so brilliantly explored by J.G. Ballard. Since the publication of Mao II in 1991, DeLillo, always an original writer, has been warning us that the visual image is supplanting the word.
Much of the violent imagery - the street chaos and crowd scenes in particular - in this new novel echoes the setpieces of that earlier novel.
DeLillo often uses language to inventive, even beautiful effect - "The noblest thing, a bridge across a river" - and his prose possesses an elegant chill. But Cosmopolis, with its custard-pie media assassin and the darker threat posed by a misfit killer (also in possession of an asymmetrical prostate) living in a squat accompanied by a exercise bike with only one pedal, ultimately lacks Ballard's bizarre profundity.
Despite the high-tech, money-market-gone-mad ethos and the genuine terror lurking behind Parker's slickness, DeLillo's post-Dallas lamenting of society's dehumanised self-destruction is far closer to Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities than to the surreal pioneering genius of Ballard's classic, Crash.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Cosmopolis By Don DeLillo Picador, 209pp, £16.99
