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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In a land of chunky, garish, anxiousto-please books, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, "Cosmopolis"(Scribner; $25), is physically cool, as sleek and silver-touched and palely pure as a white stretch limo, which is in fact the action's main venue. On the front of the book jacket we see the limo from the front, and on the back from the back, and in between stretch a tad more than two hundred tall, generous-margined pages of metafiction. Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire manager of other people's money, rises after a sleepless night in April of the year 2000, in his forty-eight-room, one-hundred-and-four-million-dollar triplex (with shark tank, borzoi pen, lap pool, gym) at the top of an eighty-nine-story apartment building on First Avenue, and tells his chief of security, "bald and no-necked"Torval, that he wants to get a haircut at the other end of forty-seventh Street. Their exchange illustrates the terse, deflective, somewhat lobotomized quality of the novel's dialogue:
"I want a haircut.”, The crosstown epic begins. In its oft-interrupted course, Packer follows, via his limo's bank of electronic screens--"all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing”--the stubborn rise of the yen, on whose fall he has bet heavily. He takes in details of city life ("A man in women's clothing walked seven elegant dogs”) and notices that on the limo's spycam his image makes a gesture a second or two before he makes it...
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