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.