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Don DeLillo should not be graded for his work or what his work seems to do — his time in school is over. In his newest novel, the 117-page Point Omega, DeLillo presents the reader with a slim, bare narrative, bookended by a viewing of Douglas Gordon’s film, 24 Hour Psycho.
This famous experimental film, a slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Psycho, runs for a 24-hour period. As DeLillo describes, each movement of the film is “barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don’t understand are said to be real.” Though short, the novel moves slowly, leisurely, like 24 Hour Psycho, like time in the desert. The writing rests deliberately, lightly on the page, fresh, sparse and smooth and punctuated with quick commas, letting the sentences run.
In this fashion, Point Omega fans out as the story of Richard Elster, an old intellectual who helped “conceptualize” the Iraq war, and has retreated into the American desert. He is joined in the desert by Jim Finley, a New York filmmaker interested in a one-take documentary recording Elster’s experiences against the backdrop of a blank wall. We are presented with grand themes: time, consciousness, extinction and geopolitics through cryptic dialogue and spare sentences. The two sit and drink, their minds meandering from film to military intelligence to “word origins and covert prisons,” finally resting on the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and his idea, the omega point: an exhaustion of consciousness, paroxysm, “back now to inorganic matter … stones in a field.” And in the quiet of wide expanses, desert, philosophy and the haze of watery scotch surround Elster and Finley, until Elster’s daughter, Jessie, comes to visit. What follows is an unraveling: Bits of the characters are revealed, an unexpected tragedy occurs and confusion and grief unfold.
DeLillo’s dialogue sinks in deep dense, like water in parched soil. And the characters seem destined to be confined to the text, though their reality reaches farther than we can see, disappearing between the lines and into the desert. This desert absorbs, stretching out in space and time, vast, like a mental landscape in the 21 century. To the chagrin of most critics, little happens and little is revealed. A solitary, devastating event forms the climax of the novel. Brief flashbacks offer some information about the characters, but they remain mysterious, like people you overhear talking in a waiting room. They converse about their marriages, war, famine, film, philosophy, time, consciousness, space, heat, extinction and the desert. And once they exit, you’re left wondering where they’ll go.
After such sweeping epics as Underworld and White Noise, critics expected grand scale and action. DeLillo has been hailed as prophetic, and so he is expected to deliver prophecy, sweeping and direct. Some have been disappointed with DeLillo’s recent novels, which seem comparatively slight, spare and oblique. Point Omega, however, must be read apart from the works that made DeLillo famous. This novel moves beyond the explicit. It resides where it should: within. It shows people adrift in the aftermath, and in the slow actions of the haunting lull immediately before. DeLillo’s decisions are daring, writing a slim novel absent of terrorist activity or Cold War hysteria. The novel comes off that daring: It is that quiet and unsure expanse that swallows past, present, and future.
What DeLillo has given us in Point Omega is not a prediction of just what is to come politically, but rather, a lens to view what no one wants to see: what is now happening to the universe and human consciousness.
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