Unable to sleep one day in April, Eric Packer, the 28-year-old billionaire in Don DeLillo’s new novel Cosmopolis, is awake in the "scrolling dawn." Packer’s days scroll forward, fluid and relentless. This one will carry him in a limousine across Manhattan in search of a haircut. He will be shorn in ways that he cannot imagine. None of the words that once would have described Packer — not tycoon, magnate, financier, or venture capitalist — relates to him. In his $104 million penthouse triplex, he is above them all. But he is not out of this world. Inside his customized limo Packer is connected — think electrical flow, constant current of image and sound — to the assets he manages. (Assets and manage are also inadequate to describe what Packer does.) On this day he has bet enormous sums that the yen will decline. This is the stream he is in as he progresses slowly across the city.

Although the epigraph that opens Cosmopolis is Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s "a rat became the unit of currency," Packer is not in the rat race. He is, to use the present-day word for the lack of control we experience in our world of getting and spending, driven. The mechanics of this are as sleek as the plasma screens in his limo across which numbers ceaselessly run. Packer thinks of this data as "soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process." Like a mighty river, it never sleeps.

Don DeLillo has always been a novelist of right now, one who has seemed to read through the news of the day to a larger understanding of what is going on. His antennae are so sensitive that the word paranoia has often been applied to the heightened attention of his fictions. In Cosmopolis, DeLillo’s radar is just as acute and his sentences are crafted like arrows to fly his story forward confident, sharp, and ruthless. But this novel has a mythic dimension. Packer is as implacable, as much of a refuser as Herman Melville’s great New Yorker Bartleby the Scrivener. Like Melville, DeLillo doesn’t waste a moment caring whether his readers find comfort or solace in his tale. He has written Cosmopolis like the poker player who spreads his winning hand before us and sneers, "Read ’em and weep."

Packer’s fortress limousine stops and starts as it inches across Manhattan. He gets out to wolf down breakfast with his wife of several weeks, a poet heiress to a great European fortune. He stops to see a mistress. His minions come to him, for the limo is a floating office through which the information highway runs. Torval, the bodyguard tethered to the information alive in our air by an ear bud, looks after him. The president of the United States is in town ("He is fluid. He is moving."), and there are second-to-second security alerts. As Packer moves at a snail’s pace, he borrows millions to raise his bet that the yen will go down. The doctor who daily examines his prostate makes a house call, and Packer’s clairvoyant, Vija Kinski, arrives for their weekly meeting. She loves the car’s plasma screens, on which she sees "The glow of cyber-capital."

The limo is halted by a violent demonstration staged by anarchists against globalization. They chant, "A specter is haunting the world"; they loose rats in midtown restaurants; they storm an investment bank, and they all but destroy Packer’s limo even though they have no idea that a monarch of capitalism is inside. He sits looking out through his tinted window absorbed in the spectacle, buying even huger quantities of the yen and philosophizing with Kinski about destruction. In their conversation emerges one of the flashes of vision that blaze in this novel. Packer and Kinski are not Dennis Kozlowski and Jack Welch. They have an airy disregard for such crude greed. They are hyper-intelligent, if heartless, and they see that anarchist and capitalist are brothers, different sides of the same coin. Both, in the words of Packer, seek to "destroy the past, to make the future."

The battered limo limps away from midtown. Packer will have several adventures outside the car before he finally gets his haircut — a tryst in a hotel room, the funeral of his favorite rapper, Brutha Fez, a stop at a movie set — and proceeds toward an ending that feels inevitable and . . . well, I’m not going to give it away. Let me just say that Packer comes to understand that what is missing in the restless forward motion of his life is "the sheer and reeling need to be." The irony of reeling is perfect. On his journey as the yen refuses to go his way, Packer also comes to understand what the legendary gambler Nick the Greek meant when he said, "The only thing better than winning is losing."

Cosmopolis is a brilliant novel both in its intelligence and its diamond hardness. It is funnier than I’ve made it seem — a derelict New Yorker dressed in bubble wrap tries to board a burning bus — but it shines and cuts. Cosmopolis isn’t of our moment but ahead of it. Packer’s fate isn’t ours yet, but many Americans have felt over the last eight months that some force we’ve set free is coming for us. This time neither our innocence nor our arrogance will be our shield. Whatever this force is, its name is in DeLillo’s book.