Guardian Book Review - Point Omega

Richard Elster, the central character of “Point Omega,” Don DeLillo’s slender new novella, is a scholar who helped the Pentagon conceptualize an intellectual framework for the Iraq war. He is being courted by a filmmaker named Finley, who wants to make a documentary with him talking about the war. Picture Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice and some American Enterprise Institutethinkers put in a Cuisinart along with Robert S. McNamara as he appeared in Errol Morris’s movie “The Fog of War.”

Like many of Mr. DeLillo’s earlier books, “Omega” is preoccupied with death and dread and paranoia, and like many of those books, it has an ingenious architecture that gains resonance in retrospect. But even its clever structural engineering can’t make up for the author’s uncharacteristically simplistic portrait of its hero: a pompous intellectual who shamelessly justifies sending thousands of young soldiers off to die in an unnecessary war with abstract, philosophical arguments, but who suddenly comes to know the meaning of death and loss firsthand when his beloved daughter abruptly disappears.

Instead of the jazzy, vernacular, darkly humorous language he employed to such galvanic effect in “White Noise” and “Underworld,” Mr. DeLillo has chosen here to use the spare, etiolated, almost Beckettian prose he used in his 2001 novella, “The Body Artist,” and his 1987 play, “The Day Room.”

And in place of the electric, highly detailed observations of American life that animate “Libra” and “Mao II,” he has substituted dreary and highly portentous musings about mortality and time. There is talk about how time feels different in the desert from the way it does in a city, talk about life versus art and art versus reality, talk about an “omega point” where “the mind transcends all direction inward” — whatever that might mean.

Occasionally, Elster sounds like Donald H. Rumsfeld orGeorge W. Bush, asserting that “a great power has to act,” that America needs “to retake the future.” But more often, Mr. DeLillo makes Elster’s speechifying about the war willfully — and absurdly — cerebral: we’re told that he’s written an essay about the word “rendition,” with “references to Middle English, Old French, Vulgar Latin and other sources and origins,” and we hear him talk about wanting a “haiku war,” which would mean “nothing beyond what it is.”

Later Elster says, “Something’s coming,” and goes on: “But isn’t this what we want? Isn’t this the burden of consciousness? We’re all played out. Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We’re the mind and heart that matter had become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now.”

All three central characters in this novel — Elster; Elster’s daughter, Jessie; and Finley — are alienated, oddly detached people. They are individuals dwelling in a limbo state, searching for something that might give order or meaning to their lives or simply shell-shocked by the randomness and menace of modern life.

Many earlier DeLillo characters, of course, share these aphasic qualities, but there is something disembodied and generic about these three. It’s hard to believe that Elster was ever called in by the government to consult on the Iraq war, just as it’s hard to believe that Finley is really a filmmaker or that Jessie does volunteer work with elderly people. They feel more like holograms than human beings.

After his stint with the government, Elster has retired to a house in the desert “to do nothing,” but sit around and think. He says he is there to “stop talking.” What he feels there is “time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time.”

Finley has come to this desert retreat to try to persuade Elster to star in his movie: the documentary would feature this aging man talking about the war, his time in government and whatever else he wants to discuss.

In New York Finley once introduced Elster to a movie called “24 Hour Psycho" at the Museum of Modern Art: an actual Conceptual art piece by Douglas Gordon showing the Hitchcock film in such slow motion that it takes 24 hours to screen. That piece raises some of the same themes that Mr. DeLillo appears to want to explore in these pages — reality and perception, identity and duplicity. It is the same work that Jessie (and possibly a man who has been following Jessie) has seen out of a desire to watch a movie in which, as she puts it, “nothing happening” seems to be the entire point.

Jessie is a strange young woman with a tendency to lapse into moods in which “she seemed deadened to anything that might bring a response.”

“Her look had an abridged quality, it wasn’t reaching the wall or window,” Finley says. “I found it disturbing to watch her, knowing that she didn’t feel watched.”

Jessie’s mother — Elster’s estranged wife — has sent her out to the desert to get her away from a man whom she has gotten to know in New York.

Though Jessie’s arrival slightly shifts the dynamic between Elster and Finley, little happens for days. The three sit around together or apart. They eat sandwiches, talk about going on an expedition to look for bighorn sheep.

Finley has fantasies about having sex with Jessie; he asks her to sit with him and takes her hand, but she gives “no sign that she’d noticed.” And then, one day, when Elster and Finley return from a grocery run, the house is empty: Jessie is gone, vanished, nowhere to be found.

Although Mr. DeLillo extracts considerable suspense from his story, while building a Pinteresque sense of dread, there is something suffocating and airless about this entire production. Unlike the people in his most memorable novels, the three characters here do not live in a recognizable America or recognizable reality — rather, they feel like roles written for a stylized and highly contrived theater piece: Elster, a paper tiger set up for a fall; Finley, his interlocutor, a forgettable loser; and Jessie, the sylphlike victim, whose disappearance will teach her father a lesson. They are roles desperately in need of actors to flesh them out and give them life.