When Francis Fukuyama wrote “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such…” triumphalism was in the air; not only had the United States seen off it’s geopolitical rivals – starting with Nazism and finishing with Communism. It ended history. History in the Hegelian sense. The Utopianism once seen on the Left could now be seen on the Right: free markets and liberal democracy were inseparable. The future was American.

And for some years, these assumptions became cultural orthodoxy. Enter the Masters of the Universe:

“He kept doing this because he knew the yen could not go any higher. He explained that they were levels it could not reach. The market knew this. There were oscillations and shocks that the market tolerated to a certain point but not beyond. The yen itself knew it could not go higher. But it did go higher, time and again.”

In Cosmopolis,  Eric Packer, is not the self-styled Master of the Tom Wolf’s Bonfire of the Vanities. He is typically DeLillo-esque. A multi-billionaire, prone to abstraction and numerical mysticism, riding through New York City in a stretch limo on a day heavy with what Saul Bellow called ‘event glamour’. The President is in town, a rapper’s funeral proceeds through the streets and an anti-globalisation protestors demonstrate in Times Square.

Don DeLillo has created a canon of literature as idiosyncratic as it is prescient. Veering away from the compendious Underworld and voodoo histories of Libra, the author’s later works have become slimmer, humbler, abstract, invariably strange. Of these later works Point Omega (2010) is the most successful with the what can only be described as a ‘quantum ghost story’ The Body Artist, the least. What could easily be dismissed as haute couture and self-regard, DeLillo has attempted an audacious novella. Packer is sub-human. An idiot savant. Like Leopold Bloom, setting out on a voyage of the mundane to the butchers’ shop in Ulysses, Packer sets out to get himself a haircut. But he is not on foot. His mode of transport is the distancing limousine in which he spends his morning engaged in bizarre conversations, unfettered lusts and having a rectal examination whilst lusting over a female colleague via telescreen.

It’s not all cyber-capitalist, market mysticism in the world of Eric Packers as he rolls around town when it’s revealed that he is has been the subject of death threats. DeLillo has written at great length about something he calls ‘Assassination Aura’; a sense of how historical event can weave their way into fiction. There are DeLillo’s hallmarks: the power of crowds, the auspices of technology and the threat of terrorism, ulterior modes of knowledge, the vacuity of consumer culture, and outright abstraction:

“Because time is a corporate asset now. It belongs to the free market system. The present is harder to find. It is being sucked out of the world to make way for the future. The future becomes insistent.”

Time has become a preoccupation of DeLillo, who’s interest of late has primarily become the nature of reality. From this everything else follows. It is the only way to understand DeLillo, the strange licks of his language, the every so slightly parallel universe he creates with a quantum awareness.

Here’s some more philosophising:

“Doubt. What is doubt? You don’t believe in doubt. You told me this. Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past the future. This is changing.”

Throughout, there are fantastic set pieces (the anti-globalisation rally is vividly drawn). The language is tight, there are connections being made that have not yet been made in fiction. This is a journey into the consumerverse: into the units of information, of formula that shape and form our world and the speculations of gurus like Packer. For DeLillo’s irresistible inventiveness, the devotion to abstraction, it seems like Packer, sometimes he may speculate too far. On this strange epochal day, Packer sees a protester self-immolate:

“Now look. A man in flames. Behind Eric all the screens were pulsing with it. And all action was at pause, the protesters and riot police milling about and only the cameras jostling.”

The act of self-immolation, of self-negation, reminds Packer that the market is not total, it could not claim this man, nor can it assimilate his act. DeLillo is writing from the frantic pulse of the West and understands that neo-Platonic mysticism in the search for perfect forms, for whole numbers, and the error and the frozen heartedness of such a life. The true life may be asymmetrical. At times Cosmopolis is puzzling and farcical. At times, beautiful and far-sighted. In the end, in the inevitably tragic final scene, Packer hopes are undimmed, Icarus fallen, suffering urges outlined in John Gray’s Immortality Commission:

“The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in a whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from the void.”

DeLillo has argued that the continued significance of the novel, “It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience.” Perhaps the best way to think of this strangely brilliant novel, is not as a novel at all, nor a prose-poem, but a tour around New York in the back of Don DeLillo’s stretch limousine.

Cosmopolis

By Don DeLillo

209pp, Picador

Wes Brown is a novelist and critic based in Leeds.