Don DeLillo (Don DeLillo: ‘I wondered what would happen if power failed everywhere’ | Don DeLillo | The Guardian) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports. He has been awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
In this novel from 2003, Eric Packer is a 28 year old billionaire asset fund manager in New York. His world is one of cyber-money in which electronic cash moves faster than human thought. Transactions are measured in zeptoseconds and yoctoseconds. Packer emerges from his 48 room triplex into an April Manhattan day.
The events of this day will include being pursued by assassins, shooting his security chief, having sex with an employee, and charging around in his cork-lined limo.
Having bet heavily on the Yen losing value, he transfers his wife’s $750 million nest-egg into bad investments. Returning eventually to the slum area where he grew up, Packer gets a final haircut before fate overtakes him.
It is interesting to reflect on the excesses of global capitalism in the intervening 21 years since 2003. These years have seen the super rich increase their share of global wealth. The three richest American families now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined. (The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country, Study Finds) We await to see whether Artificial Intelligence will control fund management in the years to come. Perhaps it will concentrate wealth even more grossly into the hands of the few.
Check if this cool, cynical dissection of the manipulators of big money is available at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
224 pages in Picador reprints
First published 2003
ISBN-13 : 978-0330524933
