I admire Don DeLillo’s work greatly, and Underworld remains one of my favourite novels in the English language. But since that masterpiece was published, DeLillo has been in uncertain form, the four novels he’s produced since then being slight, both physically and in substance. But a slight book from DeLillo is worth a great deal and, even though Point Omega is another mild disappointment, it still contains things to like.
Those looking for a fundamental change in DeLillo’s basic style of what can seem to be the occasional portentous and meaning-free sentence surrounded with gnomic, stilted dialogue will find nothing to like. But, if you’re looking for realism, DeLillo isn’t the place to start. His style can be monotonous (nowhere more so than in The Body Artist), but it can also be profoundly beautiful, often hauntingly so. Somewhere at the centre of his writing is a deep-seated angst, a fear about the business of being human, a fear about our future, and a profound sense of loneliness. It’s perhaps not surprising that this doesn’t appeal to everyone.
Point Omega is a mere 117 pages long. Its structure is that of a triptych, the most substantial part of which is the middle section, in which a filmmaker tries to entice a defence contractor called Richard Elster into making a film about the Iraq War that would consist of him simply talking to the camera. The bracketing parts are set in an exhibition space (MoMA?) where they are showing Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s thriller is played at a speed that makes it last an entire day.
DeLillo has a fascination with modern art – the painted planes in the desert in Underworld are particularly memorable – particularly conceptual art, and one could perhaps call his fiction conceptual. One could conclude that the link with the main narrative is one of a dozen different things, or that there is no link at all. DeLillo’s writing shares that maddening chameleon-like non-specificity of so much conceptual art. One feels almost dared to call bullshit on it.
The filmmaker – Jim Finley – spends days with Elster at his out of the way house, and they are joined by Elster’s daughter. The daughter is a classic DeLillo character; something is clearly not right with her, and there’s that quintessential emptiness at the centre of her being. In time, she simply disappears. Finley and Elster spend days waiting for her and, increasingly, searching for her, without result. In the end, they head back to the city.
And that’s it. It’s difficult to tell if this adds up to anything at all. As ever, there is the extraordinary power and beauty of DeLillo’s prose to admire, and there are often aphoristic asides that take the breath away, but the overwhelming impression is one of emptiness and disappointment. Of course these are effects that DeLillo aims for in his work, which is perhaps why it’s difficult to determine if the work itself is empty, or if it simply does a brilliant job of evoking emptiness.
Point Omega is certainly not the place I’d recommend readers new to DeLillo’s work to start, and it will inevitably disappoint and frustrate even readers who are already well disposed towards his more substantial earlier works. I can’t make up my mind about it. Perhaps that’s not a bad effect for a novel to have.?
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