The Frame

Final Notes on Cosmopolis

As a follow-up to my weak post on DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, I want to provide some highlights from an excellent review of the book by The American Prospect’s Mark Greif.

In my last post, I was trying to put my finger on why DeLillo’s musings on the supermarket in White Noise succeeded, but why his musings on hip-hop in Cosmopolis failed. According to Greif:

DeLillo’s strength in the past came from his ability to show the limitations of people trying to hold on to the patterns they craved. He stood characters on the pivot between sense and senselessness. There is a moment in White Noise (1985) when Jack Gladney, exposed to vapors from a toxic cloud, has his chances of survival calculated by an infallible computer. It concludes he’s already dead. That moment captured what it feels like to live enmeshed in numbers, patterns, algorithms — and still be able to look down at your two hands and see nothing changed. DeLillo wanted to know what it was like to be a statistical person, or a historical personage (as in Libra or Underworld), and still a living person.

In Cosmopolis, the patterns Eric finds in hip-hop are not essential but superfluous. Eric does not “hold on” to hip-hop, or “crave” it. And hip-hop is such a flamboyant system that it hardly holds the same allure as one undiscovered, a pattern not yet traced.

The best part, according to Greif:

The texture of the novel is its most interesting feature. Characters appear and disappear. Eric’s route isn’t mapped and the chronology isn’t altered. Only one aspect of space-time is affected: The narration starts to take apart our experience of interior, of private spaces. Eric’s apartment unfolds, revealing a fantastic existence. We discover its expansion, as details grow like crabgrass: A rotating room erupts here, a shark tank there, and the apartment itself has “forty-eight rooms.” Eric’s limousine perfects this strangeness. Visitors stand up and leave it as if it were a bedroom. The floor is made of marble. The space contracts and widens.

And the worst:

As for the politics of the novel, don’t even bother. You can’t doubt that DeLillo’s heart is in the right place. In the mouth of Eric’s “chief of theory,” however, a semi-academic named Vija Kinski, the book repeats watery versions of the stupidest analyses of the present, which are so unmindful of real conditions as to be neither of the left nor the right.

A Few Notes on DeLillo's Cosmopolis

I picked up Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis at a library sale for $.50, and read it last week. I’ll put it this way: the book almost ruined DeLillo for me. Much of the book seemed wholly unecessary, and some of it even made me embarrassed for DeLillo—particularly the part about the rapper “Brutha Fez“‘s funeral.

DeLillo tried his best to mine some cultural gold here with Brutha Fez’s funeral, but his writing came off awkward like a middle-aged white guy bobbing his head to hip-hop. Why didn’t his exploration of hip-hop succeed like his exploration of the supermarket in White Noise? I suspect that it might have something to do with hip-hop’s obsession with the real. Or maybe it is because hip-hop is too cliche a target. It is already all around us. We have already thought about what it means, whereas a supermarket has in a sense disappeared. Anyway, I’ll have to think more about that, but here are a few ideas played out in Cosmopolis:

• Our imbalances, flaws and scars—like Eric’s driver’s missing finger, Ibrahim’s damaged eye—give us a history.
• Technology is a future.
• These imbalances cannot be turned into raw data or technology.
• What about language? How does language convert us? Eric continually thinks that certain words should be obselete by now, such as chair and table, suggesting that language is just as much a technology as cell phones.
• How does this line fit in with the rest of the book: “When he [Eric] died he would not end. The world would end”?

I might return to some of these questions, but I find the book not worth much time. Now I need to go read something good by DeLillo (perhaps The Names) to get this stale taste out of my mouth.