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Summary
Summary
Writing about conspiracy theory in Libra , government cover-ups in White Noise , the Cold War in Underworld , and 9/11 in Falling Man , "DeLillo's books have been weirdly prophetic about twenty-first century America" ( The New York Times Book Review ). Now, in Point Omega , he takes on the secret strategists in America's war machine. .
In the middle of a desert "somewhere south of nowhere," to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar--an outsider--when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts--to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. "Bulk and swagger," he called it. .
At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character--"Just a man against a wall." .
The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits--an "otherworldly" woman from New York--who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible..
Author Notes
Don DeLillo was born in the Bronx, New York on November 20, 1936. He received a bachelor's degree in communication arts from Fordham University in 1958. After graduation, he was a copywriter for an advertising company and wrote short stories on the side. His first story, The River Jordan, was published two years later in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University.
His first novel, Americana, was published in 1971. His other works include Ratner's Star, The Names, Libra, Underworld, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man, Point Omega, and The Angel Esmeralda, a collection of short stories. He won several awards including the National Book Award for fiction in 1985 for White Noise, the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992 for Mao II, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
In a house in the desert, two men play a waiting game: Jim Finley waits for his host, Richard Elster, to decide whether he will appear in Finley's planned film. Elster is to stand in front of a wall and explain his role in planning the war in Iraq. Finley believes that Elster's unedited defense would be self-revealing, that the unblinking camera eye would elicit some truth larger than words. Elster, wary, toys with Finley. Gazing at the desert, he thinks in terms of geologic time, justifying himself with theories about humankind's longing for extinction. His ability to find consolation in pure theory, however, is flustered by the arrival of his daughter. Although readers will suspect early on that Finley's film will never be made, the direction of this drama is still hard to predict. Framed by an account of a man obsessed with Douglas Gordon's art installation, 24 Hour Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock's film slowed to glacial pace), this slim novel is rich with ideas about objectivity and complicity, and time and transformation. Its subject is a satisfying next step from DeLillo's 9/11-themed Falling Man (2007), although, compared to the devastating conclusion of that novel, this one feels almost bloodless. Its spare topography will prompt close analysis, but, ultimately, it's no more self-revealing than its war-architect subject.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Don DeLillo revisits old haunts and self-referential moments in an echo chamber of a novel. DON DELILLO'S spectacular career seemed to have reached some kind of omega zone almost 20 years ago. After the red-hot streak of "The Names," "White Noise" and "Libra," his 10th novel, "Mao II," was so self-derivative that one wondered how much he had left in the tank. The answer came in the form of "Underworld," an epic rejoinder that left the reader doubly pummeled: both by the scale of the undertaking and by the sustained intensity with which it was achieved. After such titanic exertions, DeLillo's next novel, "The Body Artist," felt like a warm-down, but it was followed, disastrously, by the high-concept self-karaoke of "Cosmopolis." Even "Falling Man," although a partial return to form, failed to satisfy completely: the 9/11 subject matter demanded more. So longtime admirers will approach DeLillo's new novel, "Point Omega," with as much anxiety as excitement. The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon's film project "24 Hour Psycho" (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of "the actor's eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets," "Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her." Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it's the deeper implications of the piece -what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time - that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the "radically altered plane of time": "The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw." This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix "conceptual." As soon as one puts it like that, however, doubts begin to creep in. How does this persuasive interrogation of the visible benefit from not being an essay, from being novelized? What is gained by the choreography of post-noirish suspense ("He watched two men enter, the older man using a cane and wearing a suit that looked traveled in") and the slow whir of third-person thought ("He understood for the first time . . .")? The answer is provided by the stuff in the book's middle, the meat in a slender fictive sandwich. Turns out the old guy with the cane is a scholar, Elster, who worked with the Pentagon on "risk assessments" (the classic DeLillo occupation) and provided theoretical guidance in readiness for the invasion of Iraq. The young guy, Jim Finley, another familiar DeLillo type, is trying to persuade Elster to take part in a film he wants to make. Eventually they end up in the Sonoran Desert in a house together, sitting on the deck mainly, drinking and shooting that unmistakable DeLillo breeze. They're joined by Elster's daughter, Jessie, and for a little while it's almost idyllic - "vast night, moon in transit" - in a zero-humidity sort of way. There's even a hint, a "random agitation in the air," of erotic possibility. Then something happens or doesn't happen to Jessie, and she disappears. The men search for her; the desert presses in on them, a desolate end zone of ancient time. Here it's worth mentioning another Douglas Gordon film project, which Elster and Finley could almost have driven to from their Sonoran house had the timing been right. Installed for one weekend in 2001 in the desert near Twentynine Palms, "5 Year Drive-By" projected part of "The Searchers" in real time - i.e., paced to last the five years John Wayne spent searching for his abducted niece. Unwinding at the glacial rate of about one frame every 20 minutes, it makes "24 Hour Psycho" look like the Keystone Kops, and it might have sated even Elster's need for slow time. And the man does need slow time. He came to the Southwest, he tells Finley, to get away from the sped-up, "Koyaanisqatsi"-style time of the city, the "endless counting down." In the desert he can feel "time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time." He'd had a premonition of this when Jim took him to see "24 Hour Psycho," an experience he likened to "watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years." DeLillo painstakingly inventories Elster's and Finley's movements, which are enhanced and isolated by the flow of action: "He paused and drank and paused again." The intention seems to be to slow down the prose so it works like Gordon's art, halting along frame by frame, sentence by sentence. The result, whether in the emptiness of the desert or the confines of MoMA, is a contradictory mix of the stripped down ("This is what he thought. Then he thought about combing his hair") and the padded-out ("He wasn't carrying a comb. He would have to smooth down his hair with his hands once he got in front of a mirror"). Same with the dialogue, the call and response of incantatory demotic. The response takes up the call and pitches it back: "'O.K. We'll take a drive.' 'We'll take a drive,' he said." Not that these liturgical duets are devoid of purpose or effect: "'Heat.' "'That's right,' Jessie said. "'Say the word.' "'Heat.' "'Feel it beating in.' "'Heat,' she said." Hypnotic, isn't it? It is, as long as you've forgotten the tour-de-force verbal seduction in "The Names": "Do you feel it? Tell me if you do. I want to hear you say it. Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered." "Too many goddam echoes," Elster exclaims at one point, yet he himself is a character who seems - a voice that sounds? -like a ghost refugee from DeLillo's earlier novels. The good bits in "Point Omega" keep reminding you of older good bits that turn out also to be better bits. Jessie says she likes "old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women." Pretty good, but not as smart or funny as the contingent precision of this, from DeLillo's first novel, "Americana": "It was one of those old English films in which people are always promising to meet at Victoria Station the moment the war is over." The film Finley has in mind involves Elster talking straight to the camera. "Just a man and a wall," Jim explains. "The man stands there and relates the complete experience, everything that comes to mind," all filmed in "one continuous take." This is a remake of the kind of thing David Bell talked about almost 40 years ago in "Americana": "The monologue. The antimovie. The single camera position. The expressionless actor. The shot extended to its ultimate limit in time." David sees this as "part dream, part fiction, part movies," which also sounds like a prophetic summing up of the novel "Point Omega." DeLillo's title is derived from the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Elster mentions him a couple of times, sketches his idea about the way "consciousness accumulates . . . begins to reflect upon itself," until, eventually, it reaches the omega point. We've had hints of a place like this before. "Film is more than 20th-century art," explained the director Volterra, in "The Names." "It's another part of the 20th-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, finn is implied in the thing itself." WITHIN the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim. He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and - such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction - become a hostage to the habit of "gyrate exaggerations" (the phrase is in "The Body Artist") and the signature patterns of "demolished logic." "Point Omega" starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It's barely had tune to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it's the latest increment and echo: a "last flare" that - we've been here before, too - may not be the last after all. DeLillo is mesmerized by the radically altered plane of time': 'The less there was to see . . . the more he saw.' Geoff Dyer's latest book is "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi," a novel.
Guardian Review
"The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw." The line, from Don DeLillo's new novel, is about a man watching Psycho slowed to a 24-hour running time, but it could also serve as a fairly accurate description of how it feels to read DeLillo himself these days, now that he has entered what appears to be a definitively "late" period in his work. Point Omega is very much about lateness: late life, late empire, hindsight, dread, disappearance. It is also something of an object lesson in the methods of late-phase literature in general, where the high-gloss productions of the imagination in full spate give way to a sparser, stonier art of suggestion and juxtaposition. The idea is to shift some of the work from maker to consumer: to prompt reflections on a garden rather than create a full-colour garden on the page. Most of the novella takes place in the California desert, where a film-maker is visiting the retreat of an ageing neo-con intellectual, Richard Elster, who, like Wolfowitz and the rest, was brought out from under his rock by the Bush administration and obligingly told his patrons everything they wanted to hear. The Iraq war, he ruefully recalls assuring them, would be a "Haiku" war; a "war in three lines". The film-maker, Jim Finley, wants to film Elster talking about his two years at the Pentagon, but Elster is resisting. For now, he is more in the mood to sit and reflect on grand subjects such as time, extinction and the attainment of what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point: a zen-like state of relinquished consciousness. The desert landscape, beautifully evoked, is conducive to such thoughts. The set-up seems to promise a Bellovian portrait of the hyper-educated theoretician sullied by his brush with power. And for a while Elster does come on a bit like one of Bellow's brilliant, unpleasant thinkers, spinning out skeins of philosophy from, say, the sensation of biting the dead skin off his thumb, or talking cleverly about such things as the many meanings of the word "rendition". But whereas Bellow had distinct affinities with these aggrieved, arrogant, labyrinthine souls, DeLillo seems temperamentally a million miles away from the type, and his impersonation is as interesting for what it omits as what it includes. There are none of the set-piece reminiscences of Pentagon war councils that you might expect (and that Bellow would have revelled in), and no sustained grappling with the convolutions of thought and experience that led Elster and his real-life counterparts to pimp their high-octane brains to the nastiest regime in American history. In keeping with the new aesthetic of incompletion, these are pieces of Elster's past that you have to imagine largely for yourself. But there are other ways of understanding a character than overt disclosure, and what DeLillo offers in its place provides its own kind of illumination. Along with the Finley/Elster encounter he sets up two other elements that frame and comment on it in ways that become more resonant the more you consider them. The first, in two sections that bracket the book, is that 24-hour video installation of Psycho, which an unnamed man is watching obsessively in a New York gallery, riveted by its glacially slowed-down horror - "Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her". DeLillo is always great on the subject of film (the digressions on cinema are among the best passages in The Names, as are the reflections on the Zapruder footage in Underworld). His prose, with its stylised dialogue and minute attentiveness to effects of light, often seems to aspire to the condition of cinema, with the coolly jazzed cadences providing the score. These short sections of Point Omega, where the watcher meticulously observes his own and other people's reactions to the abstracted violence on the screen, are as sharp in their own right as you would expect. But they also - such is the appealing simplicity of the book's structure - send a clarifying reverberation directly across the Elster scenes, setting the terms by which his words and evasions on the Iraq fiasco are to be understood, and giving a lethally ironic context to his ruminations on archaeological time and impending annihilation. It sounds, perhaps, a bit obvious as a juxtaposition - Shock and Awe reprised through Psycho - but the handling is subtle and deft, and it works powerfully. Complementing this conceptual framing is a more emotional counterpoint involving Elster's daughter, Jessie, who turns up at the desert retreat midway through Finley's visit. A quiet young woman, pleasant enough, with her own adroitly sketched quirky intelligence, but also with something distinctly out of whack about her, she is a fascinating study in absence, withdrawal, disconnection; her reticence the imprint of some implied psychic violence. Finley becomes increasingly attracted to her, watching her with the same uneasy intentness as the unnamed man watching Janet Leigh in Psycho: "Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn't reaching the wall or window. I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn't feel watched . . ." A series of non-encounters - sexually charged but succumbing to that same "abridged" quality - occurs between them. We learn of a mother as overbearing as the father, a stalker boyfriend . . . And then, one day, she goes missing; simply disappears into the desert. Briefly the novel becomes a thriller, with search parties, helicopters, a knife found in a cave. But the real quarry here isn't the solution to the mystery so much as the anguish and anxiety it arouses; feelings that, again, circulate back into the book's larger political themes. Elster, it has to be said, closes down as a character after the girl's disappearance, becoming just a helpless old man (which may be true to life but isn't very interesting). But by some odd alchemy of transference, the episode succeeds in giving his dark, unshouldered responsibilities, his role in the endgame of American empire, an unsettling emotional reality. The mystery itself is left hanging, but certain hints in the text, along with an elegant manipulation of the time-frame, permit a satisfying, even touching ending (though not a comforting one). It requires careful reading, but as with the man in the gallery, and as with every other aspect of this finely austere novel, the harder you look, the more you see. James Lasdun's latest book is It's Beginning to Hurt (Jonathan Cape). Captions: Framing device . . . Janet Leigh in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho Caption: article-lasdundelillo.1 The set-up seems to promise a Bellovian portrait of the hyper-educated theoretician sullied by his brush with power. And for a while [Richard Elster] does come on a bit like one of Bellow's brilliant, unpleasant thinkers, spinning out skeins of philosophy from, say, the sensation of biting the dead skin off his thumb, or talking cleverly about such things as the many meanings of the word "rendition". But whereas Bellow had distinct affinities with these aggrieved, arrogant, labyrinthine souls, [Don DeLillo] seems temperamentally a million miles away from the type, and his impersonation is as interesting for what it omits as what it includes. There are none of the set-piece reminiscences of Pentagon war councils that you might expect (and that Bellow would have revelled in), and no sustained grappling with the convolutions of thought and experience that led Elster and his real-life counterparts to pimp their high-octane brains to the nastiest regime in American history. In keeping with the new aesthetic of incompletion, these are pieces of Elster's past that you have to imagine largely for yourself. Complementing this conceptual framing is a more emotional counterpoint involving Elster's daughter, Jessie, who turns up at the desert retreat midway through [Jim Finley]'s visit. A quiet young woman, pleasant enough, with her own adroitly sketched quirky intelligence, but also with something distinctly out of whack about her, she is a fascinating study in absence, withdrawal, disconnection; her reticence the imprint of some implied psychic violence. Finley becomes increasingly attracted to her, watching her with the same uneasy intentness as the unnamed man watching [Janet Leigh] in Psycho: "Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn't reaching the wall or window. I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn't feel watched . . ." A series of non-encounters - sexually charged but succumbing to that same "abridged" quality - occurs between them. We learn of a mother as overbearing as the father, a stalker boyfriend . . . And then, one day, she goes missing; simply disappears into the desert. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
Moving a step beyond the disturbing symbolism of Falling Man (2007, etc.), DeLillo ruminates teasingly on a tendency toward obliteration perhaps locked into the DNA of all living things. His crisp, precisely understated, hauntingly elliptical narrative frames a haltingly revealed story of moral compromise between two viewings of a piece of conceptual art, fashioned from the classic Hitchcock film Psycho, displayed at a small museum in the southwestern United States. The man who watches it, enthralled, is documentary filmmaker Jim Finley, who has traveled west to interview his potential film subject: former academic Richard Elster, now retired from his employment as an advisor during the Iraq War, living in a half-finished house in the California desert. The bulk of this very short book, which in some ways resembles Albert Camus' scorching novella The Fall, describes Finley's stay with the taciturn Elster, who is only too aware he was exploited to give credence to questionable military strategic decisions. Painstakingly elicited responses to Finley's earnest questions eventually disclose Elster's conviction that, deny it as we may, humankind compulsively bends toward "the omega point" at which life declines to continue existing and embraces the comfort of nonbeing: "We want to be stones in a field." This affirmation of entropy assumes agonizing human form when Elster's frail, detached and distracted adult daughter Jessie arrives for a visit that cannot and does not resolve any of her own "failures" and disappointments. The sparse narrative climaxes with yet another retreat from engagement with reality and concludes with Elster, once again a watcher rather than a doer, transformed in a manner that crystallizes DeLillo's brilliant deployments of two series of images: those in the Hitchcock film, and the borrowed motif of stairs climbed and descended at one's peril. An icy, disturbing and masterfully composed study of guilt, loss and regretquite possibly the author's finest yet. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Life assassinates art in the latest literary missive from DeLillo (White Noise). Precocious filmmaker Jim Finley visits Richard Elster, a scholar and government consultant, to pitch an idea for a documentary about Elster. What begins as a project spiel, however, gradually becomes a series of intellectual exchanges that only intensify when Elster's daughter arrives for a visit. The three settle into a comfortable routine, only to be catapulted out of it by a completely unexpected plot twist that will leave even careful readers scratching their heads. DeLillo's prose is simultaneously spare and lyrical, creating a minimalist dreamworld that will please readers attuned to language and sound. Structural purists, meanwhile, will appreciate the novel's film-related framing device, which wraps around the main action like a blanket and unifies the whole with a painful, poignant grace. VERDICT Though it be but brief, DeLillo's latest offering is fierce. An excellent nugget of thought-provoking fiction that pits life against art and emotion against intellect. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/09.]-Leigh Anne Vrabel, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly selfaware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner. An eight-hundred-page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture, he said. I almost believed him when he said such things. He said we do this all the time, all of us, we become ourselves beneath the running thoughts and dim images, wondering idly when we'll die. This is how we live and think whether we know it or not. These are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic. The sun was burning down. This is what he wanted, to feel the deep heat beating into his body, feel the body itself, reclaim the body from what he called the nausea of News and Traffic. This was desert, out beyond cities and scattered towns. He was here to eat, sleep and sweat, here to do nothing, sit and think. There was the house and then nothing but distances, not vistas or sweeping sightlines but only distances. He was here, he said, to stop talking. There was no one to talk to but me. He did this sparingly at first and never at sunset. These were not glorious retirement sunsets of stocks and bonds. To Elster sunset was human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder. We looked and wondered. There was a trembling in the air as the unnamed colors and landforms took on definition, a clarity of outline and extent. Maybe it was the age difference between us that made me think he felt something else at last light, a persistent disquiet, uninvented. This would explain the silence. The house was a sad hybrid. There was a corrugated metal roof above a clapboard exterior with an unfinished stonework path out front and a tacked-on deck jutting from one side. This is where we sat through his hushed hour, a torchlit sky, the closeness of hills barely visible at high white noon. News and Traffic. Sports and Weather. These were his acid terms for the life he'd left behind, more than two years of living with the tight minds that made the war. It was all background noise, he said, waving a hand. He liked to wave a hand in dismissal. There were the risk assessments and policy papers, the interagency working groups. He was the outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but no experience in government. He sat at a table in a secure conference room with the strategic planners and military analysts. He was there to conceptualize, his word, in quotes, to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency. He was cleared to read classified cables and restricted transcripts, he said, and he listened to the chatter of the resident experts, the metaphysicians in the intelligence agencies, the fantasists in the Pentagon. The third floor of the E ring at the Pentagon. Bulk and swagger, he said. He'd exchanged all that for space and time. These were things he seemed to absorb through his pores. There were the distances that enfolded every feature of the landscape and there was the force of geologic time, out there somewhere, the string grids of excavators searching for weathered bone. I keep seeing the words. Heat, space, stillness, distance. They've become visual states of mind. I'm not sure what that means. I keep seeing figures in isolation, I see past physical dimension into the feelings that these words engender, feelings that deepen over time. That's the other word, time. I drove and looked. He stayed at the house, sitting on the creaky deck in a band of shade, reading. I hiked into palm washes and up unmarked trails, always water, carrying water everywhere, always a hat, wearing a broadbrimmed hat and a neckerchief, and I stood on promontories in punishing sun, stood and looked. The desert was outside my range, it was an alien being, it was science fiction, both saturating and remote, and I had to force myself to believe I was here. He knew where he was, in his chair, alive to the protoworld, I thought, the seas and reefs of ten million years ago. He closed his eyes, silently divining the nature of later extinctions, grassy plains in picture books for children, a region swarming with happy camels and giant zebras, mastodons, sabertooth tigers. Extinction was a current theme of his. The landscape inspired themes. Spaciousness and claustrophobia. This would become a theme. Copyright (c) 2010 by Don DeLillo Excerpted from Point Omega by Don DeLillo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
