Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He’s on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper’s funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric’s bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . . An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe’s Bonfire or Ellis’s Psycho, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized.

 

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