Point Omega

Jan 23, 2013 Steve aka Sckenda rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, war, desert, military-industrial-complex, art, movies

“It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.” Don DeLillo

Gentle reader, don’t come to Point Omega looking for a fun story, unique characters, or lyrical prose. “Point Omega” exists as a high-concept novella. A swirling cloud of electrons prophesying your extinction and the collapse of time encircle this haiku of a plot. Interested? If you have to ask, you probably cannot afford it.

Jim Finley wants to film a documentary about Richard Elster, “a defense intellectual” who planned...more

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Feb 07, 2010 brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

let's get past the fact that don delillo is kind of a dickhead for allowing us to pay $24 for a 117 pg novella and get to the point: it's worth it. twenty-four bucks for a whiff of the ineffable? we'll take it.

“Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” so speaks richard elster, 73 yr old cog in the american war machine, pining and praying for the extinction of the human race, asking to be zapped back to the stardust we all...more

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Feb 17, 2010 Ademption rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories

Consider me the Bizarro David MK. He doesn't like poor people and their B.O. Contrarian-contrarian that I am, I don't like whiny rich people who are so jaded they drone on about the ineffability of everything, and how no one is really sure of anything ever, and you can't cross the same river twice and so on.

Elster, a defense intellectual, picked for his mean liberal arts skills, is one such man (Fuck, if that's what it takes, the DOJ should give me a job. I'm a renaissance man with a liberal art...more Consider me the Bizarro David MK. He doesn't like poor people and their B.O. Contrarian-contrarian that I am, I don't like whiny rich people who are so jaded they drone on about the ineffability of everything, and how no one is really sure of anything ever, and you can't cross the same river twice and so on.

Elster, a defense intellectual, picked for his mean liberal arts skills, is one such man (Fuck, if that's what it takes, the DOJ should give me a job. I'm a renaissance man with a liberal arts degree). It is implied that he helped contrive the jingoism for Iraq II, trying to make it a "haiku war," creating facts from nothing and brainwashing the populace into an undulating 24-hour news channel wargasm. He is self-centered, completely oblivious to those who die and to those who repeat his empty propaganda. He plays abstract games and goes about his life until he meets a prosaic personal tragedy that undoes him.

There is also a documentary filmmaker, Finley, but he is merely an eye to observe Elster. And Elster's daughter also makes an appearance. She's self-absorbed too, broken in fact. She just floats about, trapped miles below her own skin, doing whatever it is that she does, walking this way and that. Her dad thinks her quirks are complex in the way that Cameron Diaz's characters think their cross-purpose yammering substitutes for complex (see Amanda from "The Holiday" for a prime example). Elster's Russian ex-wife makes an appearance via phone conversations, and Delillo gets her accent and stilted grammar pitch-perfect. The ex-wife, she's my favorite. She's the best flat character in the parade.

I hated Elster so much, because he is weak. He isn't weak because personal tragedy undoes him. He's weak because he is amoral, willing to harm nameless others, not responsible for his key role in a bureaucratic process that hurts many, and then isn't the super man all the way down -the guy ordinarily skipping on a road paved with other people's necks- when something rather commonplace happens to him. He is hard and emotionless, reptilian, until he feels pain. Master of the universe, and titan in his own mind, until he bumps into an emotional reality. I want my coldblooded, self-styled badasses to stay unrepentant, true to their uncaring form like Anton Chigurh or Lilah Morgan.

Elster reminds me of a few guys I've worked with. The amalgam of these guys would be someone wearing death metal t-shirts of gore and pain, willing to be theoretically cruel to outsourced teams as long as he wasn't actually implementing the policies he had a hand in crafting, not directly telling departments to work harder for less, instead having digital tools and support staff play the intermediary for him, ever ready to break the rules of the social contract and hide in bureaucracy to get things done faster and cheaper, insisting others play by the rules, and gleefully not following any protocols in secret. Pale, thin, definitely among the first against the wall if an armed revolution came. A poseur who would in no way defend himself and his actions, only point to a machine and shrug at how life sure is random in a half-hearted attempt at justification. Seduced by power, but too much of a scrotum to grab the reins and be the primary actor. The social contract, that he is so willing to bend and twist on the sly, is the only thing keeping him on life support in civilized society. Thank god, he wasn't born a Mexican, or even 70 years ago in any nation. Elster is an ideal of that amalgam: a self-important, fêted coward who gets to wax lyrical all day about the nothingingness of everything, which better serves as an unconscious critique of his personal character.

That said, Delillo can write! The plot is besides the point. It reminds me of Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart: a novella where so much Nothing happens that it eventually reaches a critical warp where something actually does occur. It is rather confusing, having this something leap out of Nothing, but then Nothing descends again covering everything in blankness. There are no explanations or satisfactory resolutions. It is Delillo's sentences that make this book worthwhile. He crafts some beauties about the unknowability of knowability and the limits of human knowledge, time, space, heat, light, and death-- epic sentences. The guy could talk about the horror of waiting in line for his healthcard or renewing his plates at the DMV, and I'd want to read and nod, and say "Yes, Don. You have your pen on the pulse of this age, and you also manage to make the dull roar of it sound entertaining." His sentences are granite. That's how I read this book, checking out the sentences, cocking my head, blinking, re-reading them, and marveling at his huge looming boulders.

I'm giving in Point Omega 3 stars, because it is such a short book, the plot is nonexistent, and there are no real characters besides Elster. Maybe it is time for Delillo to write more plays or try his hand at essays. He's gotten so spare, there are only sentences to go on.(less)

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Jul 24, 2010 Michelle rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio, novels

Audio book experiment failed.

Even though Campbell Scott has a nice voice, I probably should have read this book instead of listening to it in my car. The parts devoted to Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho were beautiful and had me wishing that for my first experience with DeLillo I had chosen to read him rather than listen to someone else read him to me.

The beginning had my attention, but then I zoned out a lot during the middle section and had to repeat tracks more than once. Towards the end of...more

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Feb 03, 2010 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Yes, for sure, in this slender little volume (especially in the first half), you'll find Don DeLillo at his most obtusely self-parodic. You see, DeLillo now apparently culls all of his dialogue from some strange dimly-lit alternate universe where stubbornly humorless men and women sit around drinking scotch and waving their arms in the general direction of infinity -- as a vague, portentous symbol of futility in the face of everythingness. This, certainly, is simultaneously DeLillo's shorthand a...more Yes, for sure, in this slender little volume (especially in the first half), you'll find Don DeLillo at his most obtusely self-parodic. You see, DeLillo now apparently culls all of his dialogue from some strange dimly-lit alternate universe where stubbornly humorless men and women sit around drinking scotch and waving their arms in the general direction of infinity -- as a vague, portentous symbol of futility in the face of everythingness. This, certainly, is simultaneously DeLillo's shorthand and shortcoming. If only his shuttle craft would quit orbiting the earth once in a while and land on its prosaic soil! Yes, I will admit that he's responsible for some of the most jaw-droppingly magical sentences in the history of the English language -- sentences which simply and precisely allude to the most indefinable and inexplicable of human experiences and sensations, but holy shit, Don. Sometimes you need to a let a character break wind or talk about how much he laughed watching Paul Blart or something. And I don't appreciate the reference to Sokurov's film Russian Ark (which, as you should well know, I hate), and yet that film suffers from the same malady as some of your novels... terminal self-seriousness and ludicrous ponderousness... Check out just a few examples from Point Omega:

1. 'Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition and interpretation.'

2. 'Day turns to night eventually but it's a matter of light and darkness, it's not passing time, mortal time. There's none of the usual terror. It's different here, time is enormous, that's what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes and survives us.'

3. 'Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature.'

These passages would be mitigated somewhat if they were third person narration, but no. They're examples of actual character dialogue... Can you even believe it? Don't invite DeLillo to your dinner parties. He'll be trying to discuss the enfolding nature of time while everyone is eating Chex mix and trying to catch up on The Biggest Loser.

AND YET! AND YET!

I really, really liked this book a lot. Despite the aforementioned problems. It's really a powerful little book, and about a third of the way in, it really sucks you into its dreamlike spell (or torpor). One of my favorite things in art is intentional ambiguity (see also Bergman's Persona and Lynch's Mulholland Drive), and Point Omega is a (mostly) succinctly despondent reverie on the opacity of human experience and our ultimately futile misalignment with the profound and tireless workings of time. (Okay, that was a pathetic attempt to parody DeLillo's ponderousness, but I invite Scribner to blurb that line on the jacket of all future editions of Point Omega.)(less)

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Feb 27, 2010 Peter added it

Hyper-abstract intellectualization. Overly-ruminative prose peppered with mysterious and incomplete sentences. Pages of characters projecting thoughts onto others. Ugh.

I get what DeLillo is going for in Point Omega: the environments that we create and choose to inhabit blind us and remind us of what makes up every millisecond of our human existence. And, the relationships and events of our lives thrust us inevitably forward, into and through the importance and significance of now. This is a nice...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Kyle Muntz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Perfect distance, perfect despair, crisp prose, "dreams of extinction", the failed pursuit of "the true life". I haven't read DeLillo in years, since White Noise, and I don't remember him being this good, though at the same time I'm not sure if this novel is his best or even a very successful. He's too much of a "Great American Author" for my tastes, but the subject matter here, from what I remember, is less familiar and a little more profound, even if it's not fleshed out fully.

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Apr 03, 2012 Boden Steiner rated it 4 of 5 stars

A friend mentioned this book the other day, and it got me thinking about it. I don't usually post formal reviews, but I found some notes scribbled from my reading:

I love the writing--no question about that--and I can sense the quilting thing going on, where, as in Underworld, it is the "whole" that makes the story, the pieces contributing to a greater thought or feeling. In much of the book DeLillo seems to be riffing on his own brand of writing and storytelling -- film as pieces, the idea of ha...more A friend mentioned this book the other day, and it got me thinking about it. I don't usually post formal reviews, but I found some notes scribbled from my reading:

I love the writing--no question about that--and I can sense the quilting thing going on, where, as in Underworld, it is the "whole" that makes the story, the pieces contributing to a greater thought or feeling. In much of the book DeLillo seems to be riffing on his own brand of writing and storytelling -- film as pieces, the idea of haiku, the precise meaning of words and, of course, his fiction filtered meditations on art and life.

Point Omega means to distill the viewing of art, and sometimes, more narrowly DeLillo's own process. In doing so, in the midst of his reflection, he has constructed a small narrative that provides a meta context--perhaps. It's left rather subjective and, at least as one interprettation, that subjectivity, the subjectivity of viewing a piece of art in a museum, consuming it frame by frame, pulling it in as many directions as observers, is absolutely the point. If this point is lost upon the reader, the subtle story of helpless loss could be his experimental way to hammer home that very feeling of unidentified loss--a fiction as metaphor. This is my interpretation--the interpretation of one reader--and it allows DeLillo a lot leg room.

I'm a fan, and knowing the brilliance on display in Underworld, the control of Cosmopolis, the sublime ending of Falling Man, I allow DeLillo that leg room. In many respects, this type of author play may be slightly maddening, and in nearly any other author's hand, an abuse of the reader's time, but given that it is Don DeLillo, and given that the prose is exacting and beautiful, I forgive him the indulgence of effort because really, who else would dare try it? Distill art and, in the same step, distill the reaction to it? No easy task. I'm convinced that DeLillo knows he's on a limb, and in so doing, he kept Point Omega at a one sitting length.

Does he achieve the goal? That's exactly the question, and the answer is as subjective as art.

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Colin Miller I don't remember much about The Body Artist, but I remember enjoying it more than Point Omega. Maybe it was just the right mood piece at the right tim...more
Apr 05, 2011 09:49am

Boden Steiner It's a very Kundera passage, and something that probably sheds light on what gravitates me toward both authors.

Kundera's Identity pretty much runs wit...more
Apr 05, 2011 10:24am

Apr 18, 2013 Patrick rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I will give this book a 2.5 because though I liked the plot twist in the end that helped him Elster out of his ivory tower funk into the real world, the first 2/3 of the book was really dull and apparently going nowhere.

The main lesson I got out of this book real life issues will trump theoretical ones any day. It also crystallizes what is truly important to people. It is the difference between being the President and acting on what needs to be done and the Supreme Court that theoretically inter...more I will give this book a 2.5 because though I liked the plot twist in the end that helped him Elster out of his ivory tower funk into the real world, the first 2/3 of the book was really dull and apparently going nowhere.

The main lesson I got out of this book real life issues will trump theoretical ones any day. It also crystallizes what is truly important to people. It is the difference between being the President and acting on what needs to be done and the Supreme Court that theoretically interprets the law with real consequences.

The book is about Finely, a documentary filmmaker wanting to do a documentary of Elster a neoconservative intellectual that is a basket of contradictions. For example, he goes into the desert because he thinks being in close proximity to people brings out unnecessary conflict yet he hates being alone. He wants control on who he is contact with. Another example is he loves engaging in war but hates violence. He is also a neoconservative with all its preemptive posturing but he thinks that government is a criminal entity.

I think it is a worthwhile idea to bring scholars who are not part of the established way of thinking about war in order to generate new ideas especially if the enemy threat is something new. Elster loved being a neoconservative intellectual in its grand thinking but hated the logistics, contingencies, and priorities of the planning that goes into war. He equates war with the present conditions of a Haiku that one gets what one seeks. Bush correctly saw how the US will win the battle but his myopic view of war did not lead him to see how he could win the peace.

A good question is can a word like rendition truly give an antiseptic intent of kidnapping people in order to interrogate them?

Elster believes that true life occurs when we are constantly self-aware of what we do and think. He prefers to be away from people when he does this because they are distraction through the process of self-awareness. He believes in living in the present moment. He likes the timelessness and space that comes with being alone in the desert. To Elster, civilization means being imprisoned by time. He advocates not telling one's significant other everything b/c it takes away from the process of being self-aware.

Point Omega is what Elster wants to achieve that is humanities transcendence through its annihilation a la Branch Dividian. Finely wants a hypnagogic experience in order to half way experience Elster mystical transcendence.

Ironically enough Elster thought process changes when Jessie mysteriously disappears into the desert without a trace. His obtuse obsession about nature of obliteration became a real concern for a missing daughter. In the face of real tragedy, Elster philosophizing of Point Omega seems hallow and out of place. They leave the desert and the hope of ever finding his daughter there.

Finley thinks Jessie missing could be do to a questionable man (possibly a stalker) whom her mother wanted her to stay away from. Finley tries to keep order in the midst of chaos that they both felt from Jessie's disappearance. Furthermore, Finely equates the lose of Jessie with the desert solitude mood.

Dennis is the museum voyeur watching the psycho movie. He breaks with obsessiveness long enough to ask for Jessie's number. Perhaps both Dennis and Jessie are just find comfort in each others eccentricities and he did not kill or kidnap Jessie against her will. While Dennis' obsession with the movie psycho merely suggests that he is a killer himself. Whether or not Dennis killed her is open to interpretation.
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Jan 24, 2011 Tim Lepczyk rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

If you're a reader who likes plot points neatly tied and convention followed, this book is not for you. Point Omega by Don DeLillo revolves around a character named Elster, who is an intellectual that was brought into the war effort around 2004. I can't think exactly who he is modeled on, but he's an apologist, a hawk, a salesman coming up with terms like "a haiku war," as if by changing the words we use to wage war we can change the context or identity of war.

Elster has quit the scene and escap...more If you're a reader who likes plot points neatly tied and convention followed, this book is not for you. Point Omega by Don DeLillo revolves around a character named Elster, who is an intellectual that was brought into the war effort around 2004. I can't think exactly who he is modeled on, but he's an apologist, a hawk, a salesman coming up with terms like "a haiku war," as if by changing the words we use to wage war we can change the context or identity of war.

Elster has quit the scene and escaped to a home in the desert when the reader meets him in the novel. He's out there with a man in his earl thirties, Jim Finley, a not so successful film maker, who wants to do an interview / monologue with Elster. Put the camera on the man and let him ramble for 90 minutes. Moreover, he worships Elster's intellect, even though Elster seems to be in a state of decline.

This narrative is sandwiched between two chapters called: Anonymity and Anonymity 2, which take place at the Museum of Modern Art where an installation of 24 Hour Pyscho is being played in a sparse, dark room. These two chapters are narrated by an anonymous man who comes to the installation for hours at a time every day. He is obsessed with the film, but also observes the other attendees. Is this nameless narrator just a passing stranger, or does he have something to do with the disappearance of Elster's daughter, Jessie?

I don't care how well this novel works or doesn't work. What I appreciate is that DeLillo is trying something new, and that he has enough caché for the book to be published. Point Omega ends with the reader wondering what may have happened; however, Elster and Finley are in the same quandary as the reader. Jessie, Elster's daughter who has been staying with them, has disappeared and no one knows what happened. Did she wander into the desert? Did she hitch a ride and run off somewhere? Was foul play involved? There are moments in life that will always be a mystery. We can conjecture, toss possibilities into the air, and ruminate, but ultimately we will never know. The book leaves the reader with these questions, and the mystery of Jessie's disappearance haunts for days to follow.(less)

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Nov 11, 2012 Simon rated it 1 of 5 stars

This is a terrible, terrible book: self-indulgent, pretentious, without meaning or explanation and largely without action or incident. Its sole plus point is its length. At less than 150 pages of well-spaced type you only waste two or three hours getting through it.
This is the first DeLillo I have read and it will be the last. I like a fair bit of modern American fiction (Roth, Franzen et al.) and was expecting to like this and then move on to what is (I think) supposed to be his best book, the...more

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Jan 03, 2011 Sean rated it 3 of 5 stars

Every so often in a bookstore or library I will run across DeLillo's books on the shelves and remember that I really like his writing. That happened tonight so I checked out Point Omega and Falling Man. After these two I suppose I'll forget about DeLillo again for another year or two.
Early impression of this book:
It feels like a cross between Edward Abbey's Fool's Progress and the documentary film Fog of War.

Just a thought: Has anyone ever seen Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates at the same time?...more

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May 06, 2013 Petja rated it 5 of 5 stars

Повече от "Бял шум"!
Накратко: параноично за забързването на времето, пренаситеността и умората на съзнанието на модерния човек.
И изобщо - препоръчвам, за който може, четенето на ДеЛило в оригинал, заради поезията в книгите му.

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Apr 23, 2010 William Thomas rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: dreck, general-fiction

Sometime while writing Libra, you decided that your work should be epic, larger than life, more important than life even. You thought you would write books with overarching universal truths steeped in history and modernism and somehow that would in turn make you a part of history. But what you began to write were flat, soft, somber, monotone pieces inflated by your ego and disguised in a thin veil of humility- as if speaking softly would show the world how humble you were. Instead, you are washe...more

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Jul 06, 2012 míol mór rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: finished, on, mar, 28, 2010, library, loan, anglo-america, postmodernism, jesuits

All of DeLillo��s novels (all the ones I��ve read at least, 8 out of 15 plus three plays) have a closed, geometrical structure, overtly self-conscious. Not incidentally they never have an index. The one exception was White Noise, and with good reason: the deconstructed, wilfully episodic narrative was well served by the loose structure. Point Omega is divided in three sections, with a Prologue and Epilogue bracketing a longer narrative. DeLillo confessed he considers the midsection as in full...more

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May 10, 2013 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars

The politics of this story bypassed me. This, for me, was a story about waiting and watching. It’s academic that the central figure is a filmmaker because he could just as easily have been a writer. I didn’t see 24 Hour Psycho when it was in Glasgow but I was aware of it and immediately set the opening section in the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art; the last thing I saw there was a film installation so that’s probably why. I related to the unnamed man from the jump but made the mistake, as I’m sure...more The politics of this story bypassed me. This, for me, was a story about waiting and watching. It’s academic that the central figure is a filmmaker because he could just as easily have been a writer. I didn’t see 24 Hour Psycho when it was in Glasgow but I was aware of it and immediately set the opening section in the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art; the last thing I saw there was a film installation so that’s probably why. I related to the unnamed man from the jump but made the mistake, as I’m sure others did, of assuming that he’s the filmmaker Jim in the main body of the book. I’m not convinced he is because the man at the start of the book witnesses “two men enter, the older man using a cane” and later Jim mentions that in New York Elster “used a cane that he didn't need”; he takes him to see the film which Elster doesn’t like and they leave after a few minutes just like the couple in the opening section. So when, in the closing section, an unnamed woman appears I was willing to believe she was the missing Jessie but we never know for sure and it doesn’t matter.

I’d only read one book by DeLillo prior to this, The Body Artist, and was entranced by it. This book has a similar feel and that pleased me no end because I’d put off reading anything else by him in case I was disappointed. In The Body Artist we have two strangers trying (and mostly failing) to connect; in Point Omega it’s three. Jim has travelled to the desert retreat of Richard Elster, a seventy-three-year-old military advisor, to try and persuade him to let him film him. The story opens on day ten and he’s no further forward and it’s no surprise that the film never gets made. Instead they talk, cook, drink, drive, shop and other such mundane stuff. It’s as if Jim has stepped into 24 Hour Psycho. At one point Elster says, “Time slows down when I'm here. Time becomes blind. I feel the landscape more than see it. I never know what day it is. I never know if a minute has passed or an hour.” Odd then that the old man’s comment on the film was that “it was like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years.”

In The Body Artist Mr Tuttle vanishes; in Omega Point it’s the daughter. People refuse (or don’t know how) to move on until they’re forced to. Jim would stand and watch 24 Hour Psycho until the bitter end but the museum closes at half-five and so he’s ejected back into the real world and that’s what happens with Jim and Elster once Jessie fails to return; they go back to the hustle and bustle of city life.

I found this a most evocative book. Nothing will ever match The Body Artist—the book came at exactly the right time for me—but this is a close second.
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Feb 12, 2013 Nyssa rated it 4 of 5 stars

Blew through this novel in one sitting. Boy, had I missed Don DeLillo. There are few things that get me like his way of crafting words does. Quick read. Created disturbance and uneasiness that sank through my entire body. Great complement to my month off from facebook with the themes of time.

My favorite lines:

Opening of Chapter 1, p. 17: 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, d...more Blew through this novel in one sitting. Boy, had I missed Don DeLillo. There are few things that get me like his way of crafting words does. Quick read. Created disturbance and uneasiness that sank through my entire body. Great complement to my month off from facebook with the themes of time.

My favorite lines:

Opening of Chapter 1, p. 17: 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 self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

p. 45: It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

p. 47: "I stayed awhile. Because even when something happens, you're waiting for it to happen."

p. 58: "Both crazy. Over the years it ripens."
"What, being crazy?"
"You don't see it at first. Either they conceal it or it just needed to ripen. Once it does, it's unmistakable."

p. 66: In the kitchen he said, "I know about your marriage. You had the kind of marriage where you tell each other everything. You told her everything. I look at you and see this in your face. It's the worst thing you can do in a marriage. Tell her everything you feel, tell her everything you do. That's why she thinks you're crazy."
At dinner, over another omelette, he waved his fork and said, "You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I"m talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself."(less)

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Jan 26, 2013 Bruce rated it 4 of 5 stars

DeLillo’s Point Omega is the third DeLillo book I’ve read, after White Noise and Mao II, and this much smaller book has a depth and intensity to it unlike those earlier novels. For me, Point Omega was reminiscent of DeLillo’s wonderfully disturbing story “Videotape,” in which the character is haunted by the videotape of an atrocity happening in a car at high speed. Point Omega also starts with a lengthy description of a videotape, but DeLillo does a brilliant thing, using a familiar video, Hitch...more DeLillo’s Point Omega is the third DeLillo book I’ve read, after White Noise and Mao II, and this much smaller book has a depth and intensity to it unlike those earlier novels. For me, Point Omega was reminiscent of DeLillo’s wonderfully disturbing story “Videotape,” in which the character is haunted by the videotape of an atrocity happening in a car at high speed. Point Omega also starts with a lengthy description of a videotape, but DeLillo does a brilliant thing, using a familiar video, Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” and transforming it into a performance art piece, slowing it down and showing it on a translucent surface, so that it can be seen frontwards on one side and in reverse on the other. All of this in a large room, observed by a character who becomes obsessed with it, returning day after day to watch, as the piece moves at a snail’s pace, it’s running time extended to 24 hours. This extended scene introduces a character whose interaction with the world around him is subdued, controlled even, it seems, by its juxtaposition with video media. And this is, of course, DeLillo’s specialty: his work provides the foremost commentary of humanity’s interaction with, dependence on, and response to its visual media, and that media’s depictions of realities and perceptions. DeLillo is the mirror held against the mirror. This scene of the “Psycho” viewing in the museum is used to bookend a longer story of a video that never gets made, a video that remains an idea in the protagonist’s head, a video of an interview with a great man, an extended interview shot directly in one session, without interruption, and pressed unedited into the final product. No questions, no positioning or guiding by an interviewer, just whatever thoughts the great man cares to share, delivered in whatever words he chooses, no interference by the filmmaker before, during, or after the shooting. The young filmmaker who has this idea is invited to the house of the great man, whose name is Elster, and so begins the present story, and account of the days and weeks the young filmmaker spends with Elster at his solitary desert home. Eventually, Elster’s daughter arrives, a person who is precious to the great man, and the young filmmaker, predictably, is taken by the girl. But then tragedy strikes and all good things that come from the interactions of the three characters, complicated interactions that happen over dinners and drinks in the heat and isolation of the desert, are destroyed.

It is an absorbing and intriguing story, brilliantly rendered and structured. It is that rare combination: it is both a quick and a challenging read. And, as with all DeLillo works, it beckons the reader to consider the complexities of our times much more deeply than we ever would have had we not picked up this little book by one of America’s truly great artist-commentators.
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Jan 17, 2013 Christina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Christina by: Darielle Rocca

Shelves: favorites

I'm not such a huge fan of Delillo's, having read Cosmopolis and hated it, but in spite of that Point Omega has become one of my favorite books, out of those books that I read in 2012. Delillo has a way of taking concepts and ideas and expounding on them for the length of a novel, and while I found that to be less effective in Cosmopolis, the use of novel as an extension of essay works well in Point Omega. The haunting and beautiful desert background highlights the on-going and seemingly useless...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Evan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My fourth DeLillo. Not my favorite, but worthy and thought-provoking. Having read White Noise and Underworld, I can see that here, as in Falling Man, a sobriety has taken the place of the earlier postmodern irony. There was always something elegaic in his prose, even when thick with parody as in White Noise. But his post-9/11 sensibility isn't having so much fun anymore. Not timid-- indeed, there is still much bravura here, but he's not clearly enjoying himself as in those earlier novels. This s...more My fourth DeLillo. Not my favorite, but worthy and thought-provoking. Having read White Noise and Underworld, I can see that here, as in Falling Man, a sobriety has taken the place of the earlier postmodern irony. There was always something elegaic in his prose, even when thick with parody as in White Noise. But his post-9/11 sensibility isn't having so much fun anymore. Not timid-- indeed, there is still much bravura here, but he's not clearly enjoying himself as in those earlier novels. This shift in DeLillo's style is a pretty good window into how much innocence we had to lose through the end of the last century even as we congratulated ourselves on being post-everything.

Three characters move the plot. There's a journalist and a young woman. However, the fulcrum is an academic (a rhapsodic philosopher) who served as a high-level adviser to DOD through the Iraq War. Spewing some kind of theoretical malarkey by way of providing a theoretical framework for our military adventures. Classic DeLillo absurdism. This "hero" skulks in the southwest desert like a Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs. And makes portentous philosophical pronouncements like several of DeLillo's earlier characters (and many old geezers I overhear in Berkeley cafes).

But here's what's revealing about the novel. Absurdism, which is the true underground poetics of failed socialist states, pushes the experience of terror to the point of bitter laughter. There is a grim, mature pleasure in it. If comedy asserts a community of insiders (who share the joke), absurdist tragicomedy asserts a community of sardonic survivors. However, the America reflected in DeLillo's post-9/11 novels is too proud to share such bitter laughter. It reacts to terror indignantly, not by recognizing a need for new theories. And our protagonist has no new theories, not really-- just an ironic jumble of old metaphysics. And even as it presents such absurdities, the over-arching tone of the novel is rather sad, as if mourning the lack of intellectual brilliance or of American greatness perhaps.

But DeLillo, the consumate 20th century New Yorker, finds salvation in modernist art. The novel is wrapped in an experience of an actual video installation that DeLillo apparently saw at MOMA in 2006 in which Hitchcock's Psycho was slowed to play over the course of 24 hours. DeLillo is very good at describing visual art, and using it as a framing device for characterization and narrative development. You see this in Underworld and Falling Man as well. Here, his descriptions of watching classic scenes from Psycho fill a room in slow motion convey an experience of living within the height of modernism. A common artist's perspective, especially from the cosmopolitan parochialism of New York, of the height of American civilization itself.

Wouldn't it be nice to escape from the downward spiral of our disappointing domestic and foreign politics and dwell in a frozen moment of high modernism? DeLillo softens our disappointment with this odd hope. (less)

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Nov 20, 2012 Anne Charnock rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: art-in-novels

This is a spare and slow-paced novel, which allows DeLillo’s characters to notice everyday banalities and make close observations. This takes the reader inside the mindset that frequently inspires contemporary art making. This short novel opens in a darkened gallery at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art where a man is watching Douglas Gordon’s video installation 24 Hour Psycho – Hitchcock’s film slowed to a running time of 24 hours. Details are revealed that are lost at normal speed – counterin...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Jeremy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Don DeLillo’s writing is endlessly rewarding. DeLillo’s novels are insightful, beautiful, complex and in some cases meditative. His prose is effortless and DeLillo is justifiably recognized as one of the great American writers of the last fifty years. I’ve not caught up with DeLillo for quite some time however. The last book I read was Great Jones Street (1973), one of his minor works, although still well worthwhile. I’ve also read Underworld (1997), which is regarded as his key work and one of...more Don DeLillo’s writing is endlessly rewarding. DeLillo’s novels are insightful, beautiful, complex and in some cases meditative. His prose is effortless and DeLillo is justifiably recognized as one of the great American writers of the last fifty years. I’ve not caught up with DeLillo for quite some time however. The last book I read was Great Jones Street (1973), one of his minor works, although still well worthwhile. I’ve also read Underworld (1997), which is regarded as his key work and one of the great novels of the 20th century. Ratner’s Star (1976), which is intense and bizarre; White Noise (1985), which is one of the defining post-modern novels, and The Names (1982), a minor classic that brings together linguistics and cults. It’s also my favourite DeLillo novel.

Point Omega follows on from a series of novellas released since the huge tome that is Underworld. Point Omega comes in at 115 pages and begins with an anonymous man obsessively focusing on an installation in an unknown museum (in New York?). The installation is a slowed down screening of Psycho - the original movie. Referred to as 24 Hour Psycho it, well, runs for 24 hours. This takes 15 pages or so, some of which is spent obsessively examining the spinning shower curtain rings after the shower curtain is ripped away in that famous murder scene. Then we cut to the desert to find Richard Elster, his daughter and a young filmmaker intent on making a documentary about Elster’s time working for the military in the aftermath of 9/11.

What’s this book about and why is it worth reading? Due to its brevity it’s hard to talk much about the content without giving too much away. The book is not really plot driven, although the narrative does move towards a defining event. Instead it stands as a meditation on the relationship between consciousness and time. Holed up in a decaying house in the desert, the characters are overwhelmed by the depth of time; they give into it and slow down to just basic existence, eating, sleeping and talking about ‘point omega’. You’ll have to read the book to find out what ‘point omega’ means, I’m not going to spoil it for you.

Sounds boring? Well, actually no. DeLillo’s prose draws you in and resonates in interesting ways. It’s subtle and doesn’t show off, simply because it doesn’t need to. Towards the end it’s what he doesn’t say that becomes important. I loved it but I also recognize that it isn’t for everyone. If you are after an action packed plot rich with tension and release then look elsewhere. There is no release to be found within the pages of Point Omega.(less)

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Aug 15, 2012 Dean rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

There's something very appealing about Don Delillo's writing for me. It could be the stripped back yet polished diamond narrative or the way he makes dialogue sound both otherworldly AND inconsequential. It just snags at my mind. I may not always understand where he goes but I am always left with a resonance of understanding more about life. Sounds deep I know.
Point Omega is a small novel that revolves around an obsessive filmmaker trying to convince an ex Bush-Era Iraq war advisor to talk abou...more

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Aug 06, 2012 David Macpherson rated it 2 of 5 stars

I don't think I got this very well. A smart guy who helped advise the military on the Iraq War now hangs out in the desert with this sad sack filmmaker who wants to make a film of the smart guy talking next to a wall. Then the smart guy's daughter comes and then something "might" have happened. I think it is a discussion of time and responsibility and landscape buy I don't know for certain. The book starts and ends with a creepy fourth character at the Museum of Modern Art watching 24 Psycho, th...more

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Jul 23, 2012 kate rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Just my take - DeLillo deserves his four stars for the following passage alone:

"We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matt...more

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Jun 26, 2012 Marc Nash rated it 5 of 5 stars

With Delillo,my favourite living author, it's all about the central metaphors and the sculpted words he plants as little word cluster bomblets that detonate in your reading mind as you progress and stop you up short. "She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself". You don't need to say anything else to have a full picture of this person in your mind's eye. This is a book about waiting. A civilian specialist adviser to the US military, has retired to the most isol...more

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Jun 13, 2012 David rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: War conceptualizers, wannabe filmmakers, intellectuals

Shelves: audiobook, novella, contemporary, war, literary, mystery, american-literature

This is one of those "people sitting around talking deep shit" books. And one of those books that I'd give 2 stars on face value, because I found it mostly pretty boring and pointless and it left me not at all inclined to go rush out and try some more Don DeLillo, yet I still appreciated the craft of his writing, so I probably will try another one of his books at some point. After all, I hated the first Cormac McCarthy novel I ever read (that was The Road, btw), but I gave McCarthy another shot...more This is one of those "people sitting around talking deep shit" books. And one of those books that I'd give 2 stars on face value, because I found it mostly pretty boring and pointless and it left me not at all inclined to go rush out and try some more Don DeLillo, yet I still appreciated the craft of his writing, so I probably will try another one of his books at some point. After all, I hated the first Cormac McCarthy novel I ever read (that was The Road, btw), but I gave McCarthy another shot because there was something compelling about his style, and now I kind of like him (in small doses). So maybe Don DeLillo can still win me over.

"I wanted a war in three lines..."

Omega Point is very short, really a novella. It's about a scholar named Richard Elster who was recruited by war planners (which war is never specified, but given the contemporary American setting it can be taken as a given) to "conceptualize" the war for them. Elster spends a lot of time talking about what he did without ever describing exactly what he did; one gets the impression he sat around making up euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" or helping spin doctors work on the PR of troop movements and bombing villages, but it's all very vague and, well, conceptual. Elster has retired to a hermit-like existence in the desert, where a filmmaker named Jim Finley has come to visit him and try to talk him into doing a sit-down documentary.

So for the next few weeks, these two dudes sit around uttering profound sentences and vaguely gesturing at the incomprehensibility of time and human existence. Then Elster's daughter Jessie comes to visit, Finley turns into something of a creeper with never-expressed sexual desires for her, and then she disappears. At this point I thought, okay, here's the plot. No, actually, there was no plot. There is no resolution. The entire story is a framing device of some kind, and you're supposed to immerse yourself into this highly intellectual mind-screw of a book, but it did not engage me.

Framing either end of the novella is another, nameless protagonist who sits around watching 24 Hour Psycho at the Modern Museum of Art.

Now, it's not like I can't handle intellectual novels, and I can do some deep textual diving when I am in the mood, but I just failed to see what DeLillo was trying to get at, and it would be more worth my time to read some other literary critic do a dissection of Point Omega than try to parse it myself. I think DeLillo is just screwing with us.

It does conjure up some strong moods in places, and there were occasional small bits of characterization that were wonderfully visual. There was something about the enigmatic, futile tone of the story and DeLillo's precise writing that earned it one more grudging star from me, and I'll carefully choose my next attempt at this award-winning author, but this one just didn't do much for me. The links to contemporary politics are both obvious and abstract, so it won't be dated quickly and it's not exactly a political novel, any more than it is precisely a psychological novel. Hell, I'm still not sure what it is.(less)

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Apr 23, 2012 Cor Heuvel rated it 5 of 5 stars

A short novel in which the blinding sunlight of a desert in the southwestern United States is surrounded in time by the darkness of an art gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where a famous movie is repeatedly shown in extreme slow motion spread over 24 hours.
A philospher who ruminates about space and time and a film-maker admirer of his are alone together in the middle of the desert for some weeks ostensibly to talk about and plan a movie that will feature only the philospher...more

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Mar 02, 2012 Maduck831 rated it 4 of 5 stars

An EXTREMELY quick read. I read it in a night. I guess it'd be considered a "Novella" or if anything a short story...Glad I picked it up at a discounted price, the book jacket had it at $24 which would have been a ridiculous price to pay for it is bascially a short story done up nice presentation wise...That said, I really liked this book, a lot better than Cosmopolis...Some great quotes and general discussions on time. For some reason I thought it had a "world ending" event but it didn't (altho...more

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Feb 14, 2012 Brent Powers rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've read most of this writer's work. I've always found him disturbing, often quite hilarious, probing, insightful, brilliant at times, an amazing stylist and reeally always satisfying. Here I am a little baffled by the structure of the book. I don't know if it quite works. As usual, I will have to reread it to completely figure it out, or begin to. His reflectsions on time, on war, on the meaning of Orwellian political cover words like "Rendition", are all quite interesting. This is a philosoph...more

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