COSMOPOLIS (Don DeLillo) - May 27/12

Well, I don't get it. This badly-written and incredibly pretentious novel, which seems to unfold in a completely different universe from our own, is just a slog from beginning to end, as DeLillo, as incompetent a modern author as I've encountered, proves utterly unable to develop a single compelling character - with the book's problems exacerbated (and this is putting it mildly) by his terse, truncated writing style. What a mess. * out of ****