Don DeLillo's Point Omega: A Desert Meditation

Point Omega
by Don DeLillo
Scribner
117 pages

Dallas Morning News
7 February 2010

Don DeLillo's Point Omega is an experimental novel presented as conceptual art. Only 117 pages, the work is overloaded with heavy ideas about war, poetics and consciousness. Though DeLillo's writing displays his patented sharpness, the novel is a shaky proposition.

Set in New York City's Museum of Modern Art and in the California desert, Point Omega's four characters – Jim Finley, Richard Elster, Jessie Elster and one anonymous, nearly spectral, museum visitor – spend much of the book in arid, abstract conversations.

The book's central narrative is capped by a prologue ("Anonymity") and epilogue ("Anonymity 2"). Narrated omnisciently, these describe an anonymous male character's responses to repeated viewings of Douglas Gordon's video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, which plays Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho at two frames a second over 24 hours. Visually ingesting the piece, the man understands Anthony Perkins' incremental actions as "pure film, pure time," motion deconstructed into an "array of ideas involving science and philosophy." The character is mesmerized as he realizes the depths possible in "the slowing of motion" and "the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing."

Finley narrates the main story in the first person, past tense, describing his quest to make a documentary about Elster's work as the chief intellectual strategist of the Iraq war. After initially rebuffing the concept in New York City, Elster summons Finley to his desert retreat to discuss the project's parameters.

Their patter seems as infinite as the desert floor. Occasionally, it rises into Elster's dusty theses on government, war, poetry and consciousness: "There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight ... The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn't." The more efficient strategy, Elster suggests, would have been "war in three lines," a haiku war form that presented Iraq as a "set of ideas linked to transient things ... See what's there and then be prepared to watch it disappear."

Elster argues later that disappearing may offer access to the "omega point": the transcendent "leap out of our biology" into inorganic matter and a higher, stiller, consciousness, a leap ignited, ironically, through introversion.

When Jessie, Elster's awkward, pale daughter, arrives at the house, a strange pas de trois arises. We realize that all four characters either see or meet one another taking in Gordon's piece, but the meaning of their mutual viewing doesn't emerge until the novel's final pages.

Though one could point to DeLillo's formal arrangement, a looping, introverting three-part prose-poem, as answer to the story line's mysteries, the author's intellectual ideas and aesthetic games never achieve a level of urgency. He doesn't shove the characters, 24 Hour Psycho, Iraq and transcendence from theoretical play to compelling literary drama.

Walton Muyumba