'Cosmopolis' takes readers on an informative but lifeless journey

There are some of us who greet the next Don Delillo book with a certain amount of anticipation. There is something comforting and intriguing about the best of his characters, as they struggle in a post-religious world, trying to grasp the meaning of the things they see, searching to make connections between seemingly arbitrary events and their equally arbitrary significance within history.

Delillo makes us think of the death-fearing J. A. K. Gladney in "White Noise," cowering behind the safety of an academic position in a small mid-western town, or the reclusive novelist Bill Gray in "Mao II," struggling between obscurity and the urge to resist being incorporated into the American institution of book writing.

But Eric Packer, the self-made billionaire and unlikely protagonist of Delillo's latest book "Cosmopolis," isn't as believable or likeable as his precursors. Instead he is an odd pastiche of traits and observances, an amorphous mass of needs and beliefs so unidentifiable as to grind this otherwise fine novel to a halt.

"Cosmopolis" takes place in one day, as Eric Packer descends from his New York apartment of 48 rooms, complete with lap pool, card parlor, gymnasium, screening room and shark tank, and, deciding he needs a haircut, hops into his limousine and instructs the driver across town to his preferred barber.

Of course the trip is not going to be so easy, as Packer's progress is stalled by a presidential parade, a funeral march for a Sufi rapper by the name of Brutha Fez and a protest on Times Square. During the trip, employees, bodyguards and old lovers stop in and out of the limo, most of them concerned with a risky gamble on the value of the yen that Packer is currently engaged in or a threat on his life that has been made by some unknown person.

Delillo's greatest skill lies in playing quintessentially American events off one another and finding meaning in their intersection. The spectacles that feed so many tabloids and television reporting also serve as a template for Delillo, as he stages absurd scenes that could easily come from real life and watches his characters react to them.

Eric Packer is an asset manager, so his world is full of the speculation of market movements and the rise and fall of currencies. His success is fed by an obsessive desire for information and a need to find "a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world," as Delillo writes in the novel.

Packer's information-lust is of course aided by modern technology, and as a result, Delillo fetishizes video displays, LCD monitors and computer screens in this novel like most male authors his age fetishize young women. The visual display units in Packer's limo, which he activates with a wave of his hand, display, "medleys of data on every screen, all the flowing symbols and alpine charts, the polychrome numbers pulsing."

And he rhapsodizes over the data that runs on these screens, saying, "In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole."

Delillo expends on screens and data what another author might save for the scenery and the surroundings.

The supporting characters of "Cosmopolis" are not immune to this need for information. In conversation, they tend to spurt essays at each other in much the same way that Packer's arrays of monitors spurt information. Their ideas eject from their mouths in thin streams and hit dead air, where they hover, offering themselves up for analysis so that their meaning and sense can be extracted.

But they don't communicate, at least not in any normal sense of the word. Instead they soliloquize, while Eric assimilates. They are the donors of information while he is the recipient, employing their "organized thoughts, challenging remarks," to help him uncover what he believes to be "an order at some deep level, a pattern that wants to be seen."

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The characters, then, for whatever life might at first appear to be in them, seem to be nothing more than living, breathing counterparts to the streams of numbers on video screens.

And this, to me, is one of the major problems of "Cosmopolis." In order to reduce his story as much as possible to pure information, he denigrates his characters to the status of talking heads that materialize, produce their ideas like engineers uploading new programs and then disappear. There is none of the humanist's interest in oddballs that went into depicting the large cast of supporting players in "Underworld," and none of the warmth and tenderly drawn hidden fear that came out of the Gladney family in "White Noise."

Eric Packer's day-long journey could have been an exciting and intense one but isn't. Unfortunately, Delillo forgot to create real characters to take us on the ride.