june 2003 DON DELILLO: COSMOPOLIS (Scribner) Near the beginning of Don DeLillo’s new novel, Cosmopolis, 28-year-old billionaire Eric Packer—a financial futurist, arrogant yet reflective and curious—eases into his marble-floored, cork-lined limousine. He needs a haircut. En route, he battles the crowd on the streets—a presidential motorcade, a rap star’s funeral procession, protesters of capitalism—and takes a series of mid-ride meetings with his team of advisors, one of whom cautions Packer on his reckless borrowing of the unpredictable yen, a currency whose patterns he is determined to uncover. Also in his crosstown path are various lovers, his new wife—an heiress-poet whom he continually barely recognizes—and, ultimately, a foaming ex-employee whose separate-chaptered notes from underground spell out Packer’s fate. DeLillo’s prose is both imaginative and exact. Beyond the city lie “toothpaste suburbs.” A local diner holds “the cross-roar of accents and languages.” In a rave’s blink dance, “a cult of starvelings.” A powerful mogul, whose assassination invigorates Packer, is captured in a single image: “Filthy rich, this chap. Women in his soup.” As he did memorably in his mammoth novel Underworld, DeLillo expertly portrays the public’s gallop, which contains, as he puts it here, “coded moments of gesture and dance.” These moments are delivered vividly and with a controlled rhythm, as is this glimpse of the rap star’s mourners: “Scores of women walked alongside the limousines, in headscarves and djellabas, hands stained with henna, and barefoot, and wailing.” Cosmopolis is a brief book that’s big on ideas: sex and death, power and wealth, and numbers. (In a quickly passing yet lasting metaphor, DeLillo describes how massive wealth has wiped the faces from our currency: “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.”) And while the story’s fuel is the fiscal, each of the book’s ideas is tied to its largest one: time. It’s no insignificant detail that the book’s cork-lined limo is a nod to the time-obsessed writer Marcel Proust, whose own dwelling was cork-lined. (Packer proudly calls his limo “prousted.”) Proud though he may be, Packer the futurist still must live by the same ticks as the rest of us, which have ticked since we don’t know when. And what’s fascinating about this character is that while he’s a bastard egoist, he’s given the added dimension of being aware of, even awed by, the world’s real mysteries. In one scene, during his in-limo doctor’s checkup, Packer looks at the screen that displays his heart, feeling “the
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passion of the body, its adaptive drive over geologic time, the poetry and chemistry of its origins in the dust of old exploding stars.” But the novel’s last voice could be Benno Levin’s, the foaming ex-employee, who in the final pages is given the run-in with Packer for which he’s been waiting, armed. These two, powerless and powerful, powerful and powerless, are linked by the common mysteries of the world. “There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time,” Levin had written in his journal. “Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?” He stands, in the end, with Packer, the fated futurist who’s forced to wait for the present to take place. —Stephen Schenkenberg WILLIAM RIVERS PITT: THE GREATEST SEDITION IS SILENCE (Pluto Press) I remember I had just dropped Laura off. She had an early meeting so I took her downtown to her job before going to my own. Seconds after she stepped out of the car, I heard Carl Kasell on NPR say a plane had reportedly struck the World Trade Center. In that drive between downtown St. Louis and Webster Groves, the entire world changed for me and every other person throughout the world. I don’t think that is an overstatement. My soul cried out for the people killed in that building, but the skeptic in me never truly quieted for long. The last five years have appeared to be a battleground for the hearts and minds of Americans between conservative Christian and the liberal Green/Democrat factions. The 2000 election was a watershed in our history where the rules of proper conduct went out the window and we saw government by force, rather than by the will of the people. September 11 gave that government the mandate it needed (and did not have) to move toward a government of control. I am not a good conspiracy theorist. I only sat through The X-Files because my friend Ellie liked it. Events in recent years have changed my attitude and led to dread that we are heading down the wrong path where return might not be possible. My concern has led me to up the amount of reading that I do each day. I try to inform myself about what happens, and I try to find allies against things I believe are wrong. One of those allies is William Rivers Pitt. The title The Greatest Sedition Is Silence comes from a speech that Bill Moyers gave on October 16, 2001. Obviously, the timing of that speech reflects the bravery of the statement in itself. Moyers, like Lewis Lapham in Harper’s, openly questioned the actions of our govern-
PAGE BY PA G E ment soon after the events of September 11. Another critic joining this vocal opposition was William Rivers Pitt. Pitt is a writer who regularly writes and edits for Truthout.org (a Web-based publication). He is a political analyst and is also identified as a teacher in Boston (if only all high school teachers could be this cool). If you type in his name in Google, you will get many hundreds of entries at various locations, all of them quite readable and eye-opening. I imagine that Pitt talks like he writes: in a stream of intelligent consciousness. The Greatest Sedition takes us from the late Clinton years (at impeachment) and leads us through the election, 9/11, and Afghanistan. Pitt takes the government to task for, among other things, being willfully blind to the true threat of terrorist activity prior to 9/11, stealing the 2000 election, allowing our links with Saudi Arabia (and oil) to flaw our foreign policy, our early assistance in the creation of the Taliban, and our support of both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He makes a very convincing case for the corruption of the government and its less-than-justifiable reasons for being in the Middle East. I would imagine that many who read this book will find much with which to disagree or to question. Pitt does a good job of laying down facts, though sometimes he pours it on a little heavy and uses a moral ruler that many administrations would have trouble living up to. This moment in history does not require subtlety; it requires volume. Pitt is our Thomas Paine, and like Paine, he is not about getting his point across quietly. Pitt is loud, and he is not afraid to use any verbal weapon to make his point. It makes for very interesting reading and will (hopefully) spoil many future broadcasts of Fox News for its readers. My regret with the book is that it covers subjects up to the moment of publication. The Iraq war was brewing, but had not yet been fought and “won.” Check out Truthout.org for Pitt’s latest broadsides. I once wrote to Pitt after he wrote a particularly good Truthout.com editorial to say that I had never before been a big believer in conspiracies, but that his writing had convinced me that something was afoot. He wrote back, “This isn’t conspiracy. It’s freakin’ policy.” I think that is the beauty of Pitt. He is a firm believer and one who is fervent in his beliefs. Filled with facts and figures, he hits you like a 280-pound defenseman. He is a writer who will never be accused of sedition. —Jim Dunn
