Newsnight Review discussed Don De Lillo's latest book Cosmopolis.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

WILL SELF:
I couldn't see what it was about at all. It was rather as if Marcell Proust had a bi-line in the Evening Standard. It didn't add up for me it was slight. As a practising novelist, there were images and metaphors in that book that I've thought of and I won't say discarded, shamefully I've used some of them, there was a lot of things: that flash of recognition when you think here's a writer that is saying something that is universally true. There are a lot of flashes of recognition when you think that this is a writer that is saying something that is universally contrived.

MARK KERMODE:
I thought it stank the place up! It took me a week to get through it. Phrases like "He didn't live in his clothes but in the body hammered out of raw experience..." Which was enough to throw it out the window. It was absolutely just style, no content. Absolutely contrived, everything that you have heard before, narrative is dead, I did that in college. New York is a bit weird and the future is actually the past, yeah I know I saw Blade Runner as well! Money talks to itself, yeah I saw Wall Street. When your books, start to remind you of 1980s Oliver Stone movies, you are in trouble. There is a fantastic bit in the middle where this central character becomes obsessed with a rapper who has died. He starts describing the rapper's music. "Grief should be powerful, Eric thought, but the crowd was still learning how to mourn a singular rapper, who mixed languages, tempos and themes", that is your dad writing about music he doesn't understand!! I thought it was insufferable on every level.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I agree with everyone around the table. I thought it was really boring, I didn't really know what it was about. We are stuck in this limo, I'm not sure whether things are meant to be funny. There is an insane moment when he is having his prostate examined and he is conducting a financial conversation. You think, am I meant to be laughing, am I meant to be weeping?

WILL SELF:
He does achieve orgasm during that prostate examination.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Am I meant to be throwing this book out of the window, which I wanted to do. Its only mercy is that it was short!

MARK LAWSON:
A highly acclaimed author. What has gone wrong ?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
It's as if he has suddenly decided to become too clever, an element of 'can I be a bit of Bret Easton Ellis, or Will Self,? A whole lot of people who can somehow bring lots of worlds together and make them work in a kind of discord and this falls apart. I mean, is he having a late mid-life crisis?

MARK LAWSON:
No, as Will suggested it's a September 11th crisis. He was a New York writer before they were and he feels he has to take on the city now.

WILL SELF:
He has to feel that again this moral singularity becomes a temporal singularity. His basic idea is the idea that the future is the past is not exactly a new McGuffen to have. It's for us type-writing fellows! We have to go back to Kay Dick. It's fine to recycle it, we are not looking at movies. Everything's in there, it is like a newspaper.

MARK KERMODE:
It is like journalism. It's the work of someone who has become so in love with their own style, that is all they are seeing. I got so annoyed with it I started re-punctuating it, putting question marks after the word 'what' because he seemed to be leaving the question marks out wilfully, because hey like I'm the kind of writer who does that.