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Everybody's beating up on Don DeLillo this spring. Pretty much everyone. Which is of a piece with Heidi Julavits' article in the premiere issue of The Believer, written to the effect that book reviewers are a careerist bunch more interested in making waves than reading and explicating carefully. Which is unfortunately obvious. One negative review of Cosmopolis, appearing in Newsweek (or was it Time?) states that Eric Packer, the book's protagonist, has, in the course of a day, sex with three women, none of whom are his recently-wedded wife. That is incorrect. The third and last woman he makes love to is his wife, a fact that's unmistakable to anyone who's read the book (all of 209 pages) through to the end. In fact (no snickering please), it struck me as easily the most moving and memorable interlude in a novel of deliberate abstractions. Conclusion: the jerk from Newsweek (or Time; I don't have either mag in front of me and will try later to clear up this terrible confusion) DIDN'T REALLY READ THE BOOK. None of this is to say that Cosmopolis is a masterpiece simply because critics/reviewers, sensing a shift in cultural tides, decided to fall upon DeLillo like the conspirators on Caesar. It is a minor work by his lights, not up to the magnificent standards of White Noise and Libra and large sections of Underworld; there is the too-easy feeling that, after the Herculean effort of Underworld, DeLillo is allowing himself to drift (his previous novel, The Body Artist, the first post-Underworld, is also relatively bare, if purposefully). But respect must be paid. At the very least, read him to the end before embarassing your own self in print.
posted by Red at 8:47 AM