DeLillo

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

Yea, I'm sure Updike is an excellent novelist, and I'm not trying
to suggest that he isn't up to reviewing DeLillo, but I would have
preferred someone less mainstream, that's all. 

On the other hand, his calm voice does serve to pique interest in
what might otherwise be an over-the-top performance:

       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.

And perhaps Updike does hint at the X-town/Hendrix connection:

       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”—

What does seem to seep through the cosmopolitan tone of the review 
is that this is a "vertical" effort by DeLillo, following up on the epic 
baseline 
he laid down in Underworld:

       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. 
    
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?030331crbo_books1

"...tall, generous-margined pages of metafiction." Two hundred-plus pages
to go eleven blocks! One envisions huge polyphonic structures which may 
or may not supervene from some harmonic intention just beyond 
consciousness:

       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 in reality. This temporal dislocation recurs, indicating 
       an underlying shift in the past-future paradigm.
    
With the U.N. at one end and a barbershop at the other- of street 47- 
it sounds as if DeLillo is able to ply the melodic without disturbing the 
dreams 
of some New Order:

       Lulled by the barbershop, its archaic scents and voices, Packer, 
       whose father grew up in a tenement across the street, relaxes his 
       day’s work of frenetic self-assertion and falls, for a few blessed 
       moments, asleep. The novel, relaxing likewise, gives us a venue in 
       which we can repose belief.

respectfully
       
          Pleasure or businesses so, our Soules admit
             For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
         Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
    This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.

(from John Donne: "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward") 
    

 



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