The man from Cosmopolis

These scores reflect the themes of DeLillo’s novel Underworld, a big book that told the story of the last century as it related to a baseball.

To which, on the basis of his new novel, Cosmopolis, the electronic librarian might care to add: Wealth and its False Promises of Immortality (82 per cent); Impermanence, Alienation and Disconnection (79 per cent); and the Symbolism of New York City (66 per cent).

And limousines. Cosmopolis takes place inside a limo; a mobile stretch coffin from which the billionaire businessman Eric Packer periodically escapes. The book takes place in April 2000, on a day of reckoning for the financial markets. To this turmoil can be added the anxieties which accompanied 11 September.

But first: cars. I mention Isaac Hayes’s peacock blue Cadillac Eldorado with white fur interior, which went on display recently at the Stax museum in Memphis.

"It’s a pimp-mobile," DeLillo says. "That’s what we were seeing in the early or mid-1970s in New York. They drove them around. They were real cars. They were there, and suddenly they were gone. When such a car was parked in Times Square, there would be 300 tourists standing around it waiting for the guy to return from his occupational duties."

The limo in Cosmopolis is no less luxuriant. It has a floor of Carrara marble: not a complete fiction. "There are men, and perhaps women, who own limos with marble floors."

DeLillo associates the sudden prepon-derance of stretch limos on the streets of New York with the surge in the financial markets. They can, he says, be seen as a defining feature of the 1990s. "It was a decade in which the theme was money. Everybody seemed to be thinking about it, and multinational corporations began to have more vitality and influence in the world than traditional government. The stock market kept climbing, technology stocks in particular and there were the limos, a fitting match for the mood."

There is, he says, "a curious perverse pride, perhaps, that some people take in this kind of over-statedness. But at the same time, you’re anonymous, because people can’t look in the windows, they’re one-way windows. And the limos are visually identical. You’re not flaunting your individuality, so it’s a curious kind of conservative opulence."

Eric Packer’s slow ride through the gridlock of Manhattan is like an updated version of Death of Salesman. Arthur Miller’s hero, Willy Loman, devoted his life to a meaningless job, only to discover that his efforts had been wasted. Packer, a young man with a middle-aged mind, has wealth beyond imagining, but is haunted by the feeling that his success is a vacuum. He hopes to die, yet to transcend mortality. "The idea," DeLillo writes, "was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void."

Packer’s world is propelled by a fantasy in which the chaos will one day subside. "The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We’re all tall and happy there ... This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want it to be."

The landscape DeLillo describes, the cosmopolis, is inescapably New York, but his novels transcend strict geography. His most common subject is time and the times in which we live. When he started out, he wrote short stories set around the Bronx, where he grew up. "They were very local and somewhat narrow."

It wasn’t until he began work on his first novel that he began to realise that his bigger subject was America. The title, Americana, came to him two years into the process. "I probably wasn’t smart enough to realise that I was over-extending myself," he says. "That’s another thing that makes me an American novelist. The fact that I was attempting something that was beyond my reach."

The cinema is DeLillo’s hidden passion, and there is talk, which he does nothing to encourage, that he may write a non-fiction book on the subject. In Cosmopolis, there is a passage in which the actions of a character are related to a memory of the movies. He is outside a doorway and becomes aware that in films, it is always possible to kick in the door and then fire the gun. "The door is always locked and he always kicks it open." It is, DeLillo says, a childhood memory. "I think this is the case with many of us. Perhaps at a psychological level we’re not always aware of. Those images remain embedded for many years."

He has rich cinematic memories of his own. "When we were kids, we went to see whatever was available. We had no sense of discrimination, and so we saw Hollywood movies, whether they were musical or what we called cowboy pictures, all the time, and gangster movies. Like any kids going to the movies there is a sense of wonder. That’s the great thing about movies. It doesn’t diminish as you get older. Obviously one’s sense of what is worthwhile changes enormously, but there’s something in movies that seems to resonate at a deep level, that has something to do with memory and perhaps morality.

"I discovered serious movies around 1959 in New York, which was, and still is, a pretty great movie city. It was the Europeans and Japanese at that time. Of course, that influence or that vitality still exists in movies from Europe and many countries in Asia, and it’s a great pleasure to be able to get off a subway and watch a film by the Dardenne brothers, the two Belgians. They’ve made three terrific movies that people don’t seem to know much about. Even in New York, their last movie, The Son, played for about two weeks. It’s a little discouraging."

He remains bemused by the quality of American-made blockbusters. "I saw the first Matrix movie which I found interesting, but I’m not sure I’ll sneak up on the second, necessarily. I don’t see the big movies. What these movies seem to do is maintain a new level of violence in the history of American film, which is technologically produced, digitally produced, and now violence is intergalactic, and it’s science-fictional, whereas more intimate, horrifying violence is European."

As examples of the latter, he cites Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, which he admires, and the films of Michael Haneke. "He did Funny Games, a movie you have trouble looking at it is so disturbing, and this is something that suggests a huge difference in film-making methods between Europe and the US."

He suggests that the novel and the feature film are intimately connected. "This connection is the narrative urge. As long as it exists in people, both those forms will survive. The novel’s not going to die unless movies die, because that will mean that there’s no more need for this storytelling element in our lives."

Of course, the one event which seemed cinematic, but which was also almost beyond comprehension, was the catastrophe of 11 September. The comparison with a disaster movie never occurred to DeLillo.

"I thought it was too powerful to seem like anything else, and I also thought that it was not handled carelessly by news organisations. The visual element was not abused. The significance of it was not abused by running the tape over and over."

He concedes, however, that the events may have played differently in New York than they did in the rest of the world, where the horror was remote, a media event.

"In New York there were eye-witnesses everywhere. Everyone had some personal involvement in it, one way or another. I was watching on television, and because I knew somebody that was trapped nearby I was also talking to him on the phone. He and his family were rescued, so there was that involvement."

The terrorist attacks halted his progress with Cosmopolis for a while. In the lull, he wrote an essay about 9/11: an attempt to order the events in his mind.

"I know of a writer who was visiting New York. He was at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street. He was leaving the hotel and he heard that something awful had happened downtown, and he could see the smoke from where he was. He got on the subway and went in that direction, and got off at 14th Street, because the trains would not proceed beyond that point. There he saw one of the two towers, and it didn’t occur to him what had happened to the other tower. There was no reason for him to think that the catastrophe was that enormous.

"And so he kept changing his vantage point on the street to find the second tower, until someone had to tell him that it had collapsed. And he said it was like a movie."

The purpose of Eric Packer’s journey is a haircut. He is travelling across town to the barber’s shop his father used to take him to. There, as he listens to the conversation between his driver and the Italian barber, invoking the past of an old New York neighbourhood, he begins to understand his predicament.

"His intimation about mortality has now begun to make sense to him. His sense of fate is based on his father’s early death, it would seem."

I asked DeLillo to what extent he shared this sense of nostalgia.

"To no extent. I don’t feel that way about such things. I go to a barber now who’s more old-fashioned than the barber I knew when I was seven-years old. But it doesn’t satisfy any nostalgia. I just want him to hurry up and stop talking."

And the immortality sought by Packer: could that be seen as a metaphor for the aims of the author?

At this suggestion, DeLillo’s reserve was punctured by a hearty laugh.

"I don’t know that that’s a terrific consolation to a guy who’s 96-years old and has a hacking cough. Also, I think it would be a mistake for anyone to think about it. We don’t know what our work is going to read like in 20, 30 years, or even in ten years."

Don DeLillo uses Colgate toothpaste and Gillette shaving foam. In his toilet bag, he keeps cushioned plasters.