Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's first novel about the superrich, is a fascinating failure. Published in 2003, it follows a 28-year-old billionaire named Eric Packer over the course of a day that he spends, for the most part, stuck in traffic in the backseat of his marble-floored limousine. Unanchored from coherent characters, it reads as a series of oblique set pieces and thesis statements rather than a fully considered novel. But the seeds of Zero K, his latest, significantly more successful work, are planted in that lesser one.

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