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Synopsis
"Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly customized white stretch limousine. On this day he is a man with two missions: to pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town." His journey to the barbershop is a contemporary odyssey, funny and fast-moving. Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral and a violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors - his experts on security, technology, currency, finance and theory. Sometimes he leaves the car for sexual encounters and sometimes he doesn't have to.
The New York Times
It's not that the novel, which is set in New York City in April 2000, declines to depict our post 9/11 world. It's that its portrait of a millennial Manhattan is hopelessly clichéd, quite devoid of the satiric black humor that made White Noise so potent and unnerving, and just as devoid of the electric detail and dead-on dialogue that have been the hallmarks of so much of Mr. DeLillo's earlier work. The novel's depiction of a master-of-the-universe type — a fabulously wealthy asset manager named Eric, who at 28 is a monster of arrogance, vulgarity and contempt — is thoroughly predictable. Its central theme, that chaos and asymmetry will trump the search for order and patterns, is a familiar one, delineated with considerably more ardor and persuasiveness by this author in previous books. — Michiko Kakutani