DON DE LILLO has rarely seen a bad review. Every once in a while, a crank or a contrarian or a youngster hungry for the spotlight will swear that the emperor has no clothes, but over the course of three decades and a dozen novels, almost every reviewer has been respectful, and very many openly reverent. No longer. DeLillo’s new novel — unlucky number 13 — has been battered in the American press. Even The New York Times, where the rule seems to be that an attack in the daily paper must be balanced with a gracious weekend welcome in the Sunday Book Review section, gave Cosmopolis a left-right combo of painfully dismissive notices.

Some of the negative press is obviously a reaction against years of fawning. And there’s another complicating factor: though Cosmopolis is not one of DeLillo’s better novels, any capsule summary makes it sound truly dreadful. Eric Packer, a ridiculously rich financier, spends a whole day traversing Manhattan in his white stretch limo, his progress slowed by a burst water main, a protest march, a funeral procession and several erotic adventures. The grail at the end of this mock-epic quest? A haircut.

It’s a busy day. Eric has worries. He’s betting against the yen and yet the yen continues to rise; his stubborn gamble threatens his own absurd riches, and also the stability of financial markets everywhere. A mentally unbalanced former employee is stalking him — and so, it seems, is his wife of 22 days, “Elise Shifrin, a poet who had right of blood to the fabulous Shifrin banking fortune of Europe and the world.” Elise pops up at regular intervals, typically immediately after Eric has had sex with some other woman.

Aha, you think, this must be satire, The Bonfire of the Vanities updated for the age of global capitalism. But as satire Cosmopolis barely keeps pace with our daily dose of real-life bizarre. And the humour is flat from the beginning, choking off the reader’s interest. Eric lives in a triplex at the top of the world’s tallest residential tower. “He walked through the apartment, 48 rooms. He did this when he felt hesitant and depressed, striding past the lap pool, the card parlor, the gymnasium, past the shark tank and the screening room.” Is the mopey tycoon, surrounded by grotesque surfeit, supposed to make us laugh?

Certainly DeLillo wants to make us think. He pits the slow grind of the city’s gears against the abstractions of high finance, the contrast evident in the crawl of urban traffic and the dazzling simultaneity of cyber-capitalism. But his ideas are more complicated than that simple opposition suggests: “He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet’s living billions.”

It’s easier to swallow this kind of multi-vitamin if either the characters or the story is compelling. Unfortunately, almost everyone Eric meets, whether it’s his bodyguard, his currency analyst, his chief of finance, or his chief of theory, talks with the same jumpy rhythm and utters portentous, streetwise prophecy (“It’s cyber-capital that creates the future”; “We are speculating into the void”; “Whoever it is, that’s who it is”). And despite some last-minute gunplay, the story as it evolves hardly improves on the sappy let’s-cross-town-for-a-haircut premise.

And yet there are at least two good reasons for reading on: to keep up with DeLillo’s preoccupations and to savour the beauty of his sentences. DeLillo has written gorgeous hymns to Manhattan, in Great Jones Street (1973), and in his masterpiece, Underworld (1997). Certain passages in Cosmopolis achieve a comparable splendor. Here, for example, Eric Packer pokes his head through the sunroof of his limo and we get what seems to be DeLillo’s elegy for the twin towers of the World Trade Center: “The bank towers loomed just beyond the avenue. They were covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them.” Eric has trouble seeing them, but thanks to DeLillo, the reader of this odd, uneasy novel sees them clearly, exactly as they were.

• Adam Begley is the books editor of The New York Observer.

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