This book feels like an undeveloped ancestor of Delillo's far better book 'Libra'. So much so that I was shocked to learn that Libra was published many years before it. In it are echoes of that novel's themes - infamy, history, assassination and class conflict. Yet these ideas are explored in a way that is comparatively infantile. Whereas Libra feels deep and worldly, Cosmopolis is shallow and narcissistic.
The protagonist, Eric, and the various characters that populate his world are not at all compelling. They are shallow and obtuse people whose speech is stilted and overwrought with clumsy philosophizing. As the novel went on I was begging for them to stop talking so much, to quit the endless repetition of their conversations. For such a short book, I felt it went on far too long.
I think the book is a failure, but at least it does not fail in a wholly uninteresting way. There are occasional flashes of brilliance - the pie-assassin, Brotha Fez's funeral, an evocative description of New York's Diamond District. Yet these segments are buried within a whole lot of shit. I would tentatively recommend the book to those that have read and loved Libra, as there are interesting parallels between both works. To anyone else, I would say steer clear.

I'm not even sure what I just read. This is the only book I've ever started that I wanted to give up on, but as a personal rule.. I kept going until the end, hoping for it to get better. The writing is so disjointed - I couldn't even figure out where Eric Packer was half the time, much less what he was doing or who he was with. There were too many characters, too briefly introduced. Honestly, the book was so fast paced, I didn't even have time to get to know and connect with the main character. I wanted to read this because of the new Cronenberg movie - I'm really hoping he was able to do something great with this garbage.. but we'll see.

Reading this a second time with an essay in mind is quite a different experience. DeLillo is so quick to read you almost forget that you're reading a very complicated text. He's a master of dialogue, this is how people (should) talk.

Weird. Kind of awesome. Fast read. Leaves you shaking your head, going "huh wha?"

Teeters between phoned-in self-parody and vintage DeLillo. His hallmark prose—those probing, cutting sentences—is still intact. He is among the very best ever at saying that thing you’ve always known but never found words for, or, things you knew but didn’t know you knew (unknown knowns). His dialogue (in which everyone speaks fragmentally, elliptically, and past each other), like poetry, hints at something realer about the way we talk to each other than any realistic fiction. But ultimately the feeling as a reader is that the great writer was not at his most inspired in this particular instance. The instance is: a man beyond wealth, beyond power, obsoleting words and concepts as quickly as they pop into his head; a man belonging to the next century. Truly operating along the schizophrenic logic of capitalism—finding diffuse and unexpected, nonsensical connections in the overwhelming chaos of information—and succeeding, to a point. What could he not want?

If I had found this in a timeline where I had just read American Psycho and had never read any other DeLillo, I would have loved it—a much more mystical, obtuse look into power than B.E.E. is capable of. Unfortunately, in this timeline, it feels a bit meh compared to the other great DeLillo books I’ve already read.

Still a categorical must-read if you sense the strange glory DeLillo taps into, i.e. if you love his other stuff. Won’t take you more than a few days, anyway

Poetry pours from Cosmopolis, a sweaty rut of discourse and images about the nature of power in our world. Delillo is prescient and impactful, but he's always been, hasn't he?

The protagonist finds obsoletion everywhere and the reader cringes, suddenly questioning their own utility. The ending proved blurred but effective. I sense the message within. The dedication to Paul Auster was intriguing as well. I may see the film now.

Intriguing and engaging, but icy. DeLillo seems to create pawns to move around rather than characters.

Not great, had some good prose but felt…unfocused. Like was this an indictment of capitalism or a portrait of someone corrupted by it? Maybe both? Want to read some of his “good stuff”

It was alright