deLillo Don

Eric Packer is a brilliant young financier who loses and makes millions of dollars in a matter of seconds, speculating on currencies and the stock market. The novel chronicles a single day in which Eric travels across the city in his limousine, alternating between fleeting sexual encounters, hurried breakfasts, traffic jams caused by violent protests and the funeral of a music idol, a doctor's examination, and the constant monitoring of the yen's performance—a currency against which he is losing millions of dollars. If at first the narrative seems surreal and ironic in its aim to depict the absurd life of a young man of finance, at a certain point in the novel one realizes it is heading toward tragedy. In reality, Eric's own life, well shielded by bodyguards and his limousine, is threatened by a wave of attacks—some far-off—targeting figures in the financial world. As the day unfolds, the barriers—both psychological and physical—that separate the young millionaire from the violent world surrounding him begin to fall. Eric moves toward death (he will be killed), yet he almost seems to crave and seek it out to escape a life that might become burdensome and unbearable if he can no longer relish the thrill born from the pursuit of money. > He understood what he was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of great excitement that guided him through his days, the pure and intense need to live . The novel's premise is undeniably brilliant and unfolds on multiple levels: the protagonist’s existential crisis (he wakes up longing to go to the barber like an ordinary man), the depiction of a chaotic and absurd city, the hurried human interactions typical of the business and information age, and ultimately death as an inescapable denouement. The plot as a whole, replete with baffling episodes and characters, along with an exceptionally demanding linguistic structure in terms of both vocabulary and syntax, conspires to make the reading experience cryptic and ponderous. The book is fittingly dedicated to Paul Auster, as the intellectual imprint of this author—a hallmark of many New York writers—predominates.