From Publishers Weekly
For a book about a 28-year-old new-economy billionaire with a "frozen heart," Patton adopts a distant, machine-like narrative tone that has all the warmth of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It's a fitting approach, as the asset manager at the novel's center, Eric Packer, is hardly an avaricious tycoon, but rather an insular and literate egotist who seems more given to detached, philosophical reveries on everyday trivialities than to serious business analysis. That, too, fits, as this novel from DeLillo (Underworld; White Noise) takes place entirely in one day as Packer's life unravels while he's driven across Manhattan to get a haircut. He remains aloof both to listeners and to those around him, and Patton's understated reading imbues the proceedings with the subtle edginess of a mild drug. That's not to say that things are completely monotone, though; Patton also deftly portrays characters ranging from Packer's gruff, paranoid head of security to his aging Italian barber, one of the few characters who seem truly human. But the book is really an extended meditation, and while Patton's pitch may be perfect, the recording isn't for everyone.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Unlike his sprawling masterpiece, Underworld, DeLillo's 13th novel is short and tightly focused, indeed almost claustrophobic. Most of the action takes place inside a "prousted" (cork-lined) stretch limo, as the reclusive financial wizard Eric Packer is chauffeured across Manhattan for a haircut. Thanks to a presidential visit, antiglobalization demonstrations, and a celebrity funeral, this journey takes up most of the day. Stuck in traffic, Packer anxiously monitors the value of the yen on the limo's computer. Using the car as his office, he summons advisors from nearby shops and restaurants. His physician gives him a rubber-gloved physical exam in the back seat as Packer discusses imminent financial ruin with his broker and angry crowds block the streets. This work most closely resembles The Body Artist in its brevity and straightforward narrative flow. However, the earlier novel was written in an uncharacteristically warm, poetic style, promising a new direction for this important writer, while Cosmopolis reverts to the standard DeLillo boilerplate, perceptive and funny but also brittle and cold. This, coupled with the book's dated 1990s sensibility, makes Cosmopolis a step backward rather than an artistic advance.Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Don DeLillo has avid fans who adore the humor, symbolism, and neo-Gothic fantasy of Underworld and his other novels. In this one, a youngish tycoon enters his custom-made limo to traverse Manhattan for a haircut. The journey takes him an entire day, becoming an odyssey of erotic and satiric adventures, ending with a confrontation with his would-be assassin. Echoes of Joyce, Cheever, and Tom Robbins abound. Will Patton lowers his rugged voice to a near whisper, imbuing the entire exercise with a sinister presentiment of doom. In so doing, much of the humor is sacrificed. The combination of murky text and mumbling reader makes the novel difficult to concentrate on. Y.R. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
It's April in the year 2000 in the cosmopolis of New York. A day of epic gridlock due to a visit by the president and a violent antiglobalization protest. A good day to leave the white stretch limo at the curb, but assets manager Eric Packer, 28, buff, ruthless, and obscenely wealthy, insists on being driven across town to get a haircut. His chief of security objects: there's a credible threat against his life. But this only encourages Packer, who likes to rule his domain from his high-tech chariot, where his employees crawl in to make their reports, where myriad screens carry the ceaseless data stream of the currency markets, where a doctor performs his daily check-up. Quasi-mystic Packer is obsessed, on this fateful day, with the yen, strangely aroused by graphic coverage of the murders of other major financial players, and keenly aware that he has the power to pitch the entire monetary system into chaos. Packer is, in short, a monster--a man who has lost his soul in an accelerated world without heart. And DeLillo, master novelist and seer, tells the surreal, electrifying story of this dehumanized moneyman in English scrubbed so clean and assembled so exquisitely it seems like a new language. By turns breathtakingly poetic and devastatingly witty, his descriptions of today's urban reality--extravagantly kinetic Times Square financial displays (information as "pure spectacle") presided over by gigantic billboards of the "underwear gods"--make the present seem like a forbidding, to-be-avoided future. "We need a new theory of time," muses one of Packer's advisors. No, suggests DeLillo, we need to reclaim life. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end. The booming times of market optimism -- when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments -- are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. Today he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral, and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- experts on security, technology, currency, finance, and a few sexual partners -- as the limo sputters toward an increasingly uncertain future. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of the spectacular downfall of one man, and of an era.

Download Description
"It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about to end -- those booming times of market optimism when the culture boiled with money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town. His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to. Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and global, a vivid and moving account of a spectacular downfall. "

About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of thirteen novels and two plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Jerusalem Prize.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Don DeLillo's brilliant novels explore the intricacies, conflicts, and contradictions of American culture. His thirteenth is another inspired, cerebral, sometimes surreal narrative, this time skewering 1990s economic exuberance as it tracks the downfall of a 28-year-old Wall Street billionaire over the course of a day-long crosstown limousine trip in traffic-clogged Manhattan. Grand, incisive, cheerfully satirical, and filled with penetrating descriptions that bring to life a high-energy urban existence ruled by Wall Street, Cosmopolis is an incredibly compact and taut story that provides rich commentary on the vacuous nature of New York high finance and the current state of world affairs. Tom Piccirilli

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town." His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Lacayo

this may be the sexiest book of the year.—Time

Book Magazine - Tom LeClair

After the dense layering of novels like Libra and Underworld, which was nominated for a 1997 National Book Award, DeLillo has chosen an almost cartoonish pop-up narrative for his latest novel, which takes place over the course of a day. The story concerns a billionaire New York asset manager named Eric Packer who initiates a self-destructive spiral for reasons the book never makes clear. On an April morning in 2000, Packer leaves his forty-eight-room apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, decides he wants a haircut and orders his cork-lined and everything-equipped limousine to take him across town to his childhood barber in Hell's Kitchen. Because of traffic snarls, an anti-globalization riot near Times Square, a funeral procession for a rap star and Packer's departures from the limo to eat meals, talk with his wife, visit a bookstore, watch a rave and have sex with two other women, the trip extends into the early morning hours. Packer spends much of his day escaping the insulation of his wealth and attempting to enjoy common pleasures outside the limo. But he also intentionally loses money in reckless speculation, engages in a gratuitous act of violence, bursts out of the barber's chair with only half a haircut and places himself in mortal danger. DeLillo offers little about Packer's background, so psychology can't help explain character as it does in traditional realism. Packer's motives are paradoxical, possibly pathological, by turns self-asserting and self-abasing. Emboldened by his financial success, Packer envisions a future when a human being can become immortal by being encoded "in a chip, on a disk, as data." He appears to havefallen victim to a pernicious belief that cybernetic systems could banish enigma from existence, and once he begins to doubt the transcendental power of data, Packer desires an Icarus-like crash and burn. Into the third-person narrative of Packer's progress, DeLillo inserts pages of the first-person "confessions" of one Benno Levin, a disgruntled former employee of Packer who threatens his one-time boss and confronts him at the novel's end. Although Levin plans to write thousands of pages explaining why he wants to destroy Packer, the motives Levin does manage to articulate are murky. DeLillo composes Levin's confessions in a chaotic or "misshapen" style￯﾿ﾽwords full or mysteriously empty of meaning, sentences that jump from subject to subject, ideas that repeat. In Mao II, DeLillo's 1991 novel about the diminished power of the writer in contemporary culture, a novelist puts his life on the line trying to rescue a hostage in Lebanon. In Cosmopolis, the writer Levin plots to take a life, saying that he wants "to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone." In telling Packer and Levin's story, DeLillo sacrifices the realism and emotional engagement of a novel like Underworld or even The Body Artist. Ever artful in his sentences and arrangements, he doesn't devolve to populist sentiment or propaganda but may engage in wishful thinking when he has his financial pharaoh engineer his own downfall. Cosmopolis is not one of DeLillo's best novels, but it is one of his best intentioned and should be widely read, probably twice or more by those who enjoy contemplating life's enigmas.

Publishers Weekly

For a book about a 28-year-old new-economy billionaire with a "frozen heart," Patton adopts a distant, machine-like narrative tone that has all the warmth of the computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. It's a fitting approach, as the asset manager at the novel's center, Eric Packer, is hardly an avaricious tycoon, but rather an insular and literate egotist who seems more given to detached, philosophical reveries on everyday trivialities than to serious business analysis. That, too, fits, as this novel from DeLillo (Underworld; White Noise) takes place entirely in one day as Packer's life unravels while he's driven across Manhattan to get a haircut. He remains aloof both to listeners and to those around him, and Patton's understated reading imbues the proceedings with the subtle edginess of a mild drug. That's not to say that things are completely monotone, though; Patton also deftly portrays characters ranging from Packer's gruff, paranoid head of security to his aging Italian barber, one of the few characters who seem truly human. But the book is really an extended meditation, and while Patton's pitch may be perfect, the recording isn't for everyone. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover (Forecasts, Dec. 9, 2002). (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Financier Eric Packer is having a bad day. As he is being driven around Manhattan in his stretch limo, traffic is clogged by a presidential visit and by the funeral of a rap star. Then anticapitalists stage a lengthy and violent demonstration. While all this is going on, Eric's new marriage crumbles, his empire collapses, and at least one assassin lurks. DeLillo is a great novelist, but he seems to be treading water in Cosmopolis, having offered his analysis of American society's excesses more entertainingly and with more depth in such works as White Noise, Libra, and Underground. Eric and his problems are never very interesting, and DeLillo's treatment of them seems repetitive, often boring. Will Patton reads in an insinuating whisper that perfectly captures both Eric's aimlessness and the sinister activities surrounding him. Recommended only for those collections where anything by DeLillo is considered essential.-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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