When Cosmopolis was first published, it received (in the beautifully blank words of Wikipedia) ‘mixed to negative’ reviews. John Updike commented ‘The trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens’. Jessica Slater wrote ‘His style, as always, is unique and insightful, but for all he packs into that one day in April, he fails to show us anything we haven't seen before.’ I imagine in the year afterwards the book looked like something which might be brushed under the carpet whilst White Noise and Underworld shared the limelight.
Then, something very odd happened. The world caught up.
By 2012, the world of Cosmopolis was starting to eerily match our own. The recession, shown in the book through the ever rising, ever elusive yen, suddenly put real people out of real jobs. The Occupy Wall Street marches and 99%, as well as the riots in London earlier this year, suddenly felt a lot like the anti-globalist rat protests halfway through the book, which disappear just as suddenly as the marches and riots did in real life. Eric Packer constantly thinks about how everything is obsolete, how he needs to be a whole generation ahead, and with iPhones instead of PDAs, the growth of internet shopping instead of the high street, he’s stuck in the present again.
Now, David Cronenberg (of The Fly, Videodrome and A History of Violence fame) has filmed it with Robert Pattinson in the lead role. You’ve probably seen the film, or at least a trailer, by the time you read this anyway. And new copies of the book are emerging, with quotes which now tell us the book is a ‘brilliant excursion into the decadence of contemporary culture’ (Sunday Times) and ‘we ignore him at our peril’ (Blake Morrison). Was Don DeLillo too many steps ahead for us to understand? Will the novel exit this renewed surge of interest with a scuffed sticker reading ‘as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe’s Bonfire or Ellis’s Psycho’ (from the blurb of the actual book)?
The book is set on an April day in 2000, but even before 9/11 Packer’s world is collapsing. Teenagers take drugs and rave in ruined theatres. Over the course of the day, Packer’s white pristine limousine is spray-painted on, smashed up, and urinated on. And the yen is rising and rising, there aren’t any signs of it slowing down, and no-one knows why, not even the multi-billionaire genius who’s seemingly worked out the entire stock market.
Yet this is exactly what Packer needs. By becoming one of the 1% and surrounding himself with wireless technology stuffed in his luxurious car (which moves so slowly down the Manhattan streets that he often gets out to meet other people or eat, and then returns, it having moved few feet forwards), Packer has cut off his feelings, physical pain and emotion (he barely recognises his wife, and always refers to her by her full name). Unlike Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, whose reaction is outwardly violent, killing and torturing others as a product of his world, Packer starts hurting himself in order to feel something again. He puts himself in danger because, after such a sheltered existence, this is the only way he can feel alive.
So it’s a satire, and a good one at that. But as a narrative, the criticisms made on its publication still stand. There were sections of the text which felt boring and drawn out, which is especially a problem in what is quite a small book. Particularly the final section, after his limousine had been parked, felt stretched beyond its natural endpoint. I remember reading a description of the dialogue in the novel as Pinteresque. The problem is, Pinter’s language was carefully constructed to create a brooding, overshadowing menace (‘the weasel under the cocktail cabinet’). In Cosmopolis, although this effect is sometimes achieved brilliantly, the rest of the time it comes across as pretentious and dull.
Although there are moments such as the riot in the second chapter which are remarkably well written, Cosmopolis is in some ways a book more suited to the cinema. Particularly the dialogue, I reckon, if spoken by the right actors, would reach the tense state it is currently just missing. The film is currently being touted as ‘the first film about our new millennium’. Maybe all this marketing and hype will be worth it. If anyone should direct a film based on this book, it should be Cronenberg.
Cosmopolis can be bought here
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