ABSTRACT
Consonant with its title, DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003) is a novel of world quality, dense and concise, at the same time complex, a fitting if ambivalent epilogue for this volume, as the reader will detect in the echoes and absences of earlier works and themes throughout this final essay. Set in Manhattan on an April day in "The Year Two Thousand," the book begins with an epigraph, "a rat became the unit of currency." from the Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert's poem "Report from the Besieged City." DeLillo read the poem at a meeting in New York City on October 11, 2001, and followed that up with reflections "in the shadow of September" in Harper's in December, and later with a novel about the appalling effects of 9/11 in the lives of a few individuals, Falling Man (2007). In the New York Times Book Review, Frank Rich treated Falling Man in relation to that article and to suggestions of apocalyptic destruction and terrorism in earlier DeLillo books, in the process dismissing Cosmopolis (Rich, 2007). Yet Cosmopolis echoes the themes and many details of the Harper's essay, and as this epilogue will show, is of far more comprehensive significance than Falling Man. Indeed, Cosmopolis's narrative of the last day in the life of a young but appallingly dehumanized cyber-capitalist is a culmination of the theme of the city as globalization (and as global target) from Baudelaire's "The Bad Glazier" on. As such, it stands up handsomely to comparison with pioneering reflections about The Global City by Saskia Sassen (1991), the range and explanatory power of David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (2000), and Manuel Castells' compelling depiction of The Information Age (1996–2000).
