Cosmopolis

Five things you didn't know about limousines:

1- According to the infallible wisdom of Wikipedia, the word limousine is "derived from the name of the French region Limousin, because this covered compartment physically resembled the cloak hood worn by the shepherds there."

2- At 70 feet long, with room for 40 people and requiring a crew of three, the world's largest limousine might just plausibly be the Midnight Rider.

3- The "First Limo," or the car used to ferry President Barack Obama, isn't far behind.  It's a 2009 Cadillac "Presidential Limousine," with five-inch armor plating.

4- Heart of a Lion, Wings of a Bat is one of the signature anthems of Limozeen, a mostly fake hair metal band created by the Chapman Brothers, the guys behind Homestar Runner. 

5- I know I've ridden (rode? rided?) in a limo before...but I have absolutely zero memory of it. Weird, huh?


Books are funny.

No. Just no.

They're not (usually) very time-sensitive things, especially if, like me, you spend your time sifting through dozens of smelly used bookstores. 

But once in a while, they'll surprise you.  Just last week, I finished Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.  The very next day, I happened to be in Victoria's Bay Centre food court - absolutely NOT having any A&W, how dare you suggest such a thing - when I glanced up at the Entertainment News. 

Yup, the book I just read is going to be a movie. Interesting. 

Starring this guy over there. To the right. Yeah, him. 

Yeah, I know.

Sigh.

Right, the book.  Cosmopolis, unlike DeLillo's previous work, met with reviews best called "mixed."  Reaction ranged from "not his best" down to "fucking awful."  (Not an exact quote, but you get the idea.) 

Whatever your reaction, it's certainly an ambitious attempt. Just as every actor deeply and badly wants to play Hamlet, most writers have a secret little altar dedicated to James Joyce's Ulysses...which they believe to be a great novel. The fact that precious few can be bothered to get through the whole thing is part of the appeal; it's a badge of honour thing. Or maybe just pure snobbery.  It's tough to tell.

Eric Packer's Universe. Not pictured: rectal probe

Like Ulysses, Cosmopolis takes place in a single day.  Eric Packer is a multi-millionaire asset manager, but he seems even richer than that. Money literally has zero meaning to him.  He spends the day being driven across New York in search of lost time a haircut. He stops along the way to meet a bizarre collection of characters, and have some fleeting and often quite nasty sex. 

(How nasty? He propositions an employee while having a doctor examine his prostate. That's as much detail as you need.)

The problem? Well, there are several. Packer is completely alien, and not in a good, interesting way. He's not fully realized - you never get a sense of who he is. It's more like DeLillo decided to make his main character always turn left when every other human being would turn right - even (spoiler alert) if turning left meant certain ruin and violent death.

There's special, and then there's different for the sake of being difficult. And that's Packer.

You wish, buddy.

The characrter is most like is probably either Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, or Camus' Outsider.  In other words, an existentialist. But again, merely being a distant asshole (possibly a sociopath) does not an existentialist make.

The other, bigger problem?  The book is a sprint, and it doesn't really need to be. We're fleetingly introduced to Packer's killer, who used to work for him, and for whom killing Packer is Super Meaningful. And stuff. But he's just kind of there because DeLillo wanted to kill off his half-formed creation with a Super Meaningful Death. But it's not meaningful just because you say it's meaningful. 

Am I interested to see the movie?  Well, you know how they say the book is always better than the movie?  In this case, the book...well, it's not very good.


So, no.  Even if Robert Pattinson dies.