Point Omega
Don DeLillo
Scribner
(February 2010, $24.00, 119 pages)
Review by Lacey N. Dunham
Bookending Point Omega, Don DeLillo’s fifteenth novel, is a strange loner keeping vigil over Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous film Psycho as it unfolds at a speed of one frame per second in an eternally darkened room at the Museum of Modern Art. In his first appearance, the loner yearns for "a woman to arrive, a woman alone, someone he might talk to & soft spoken, in a pale summer dress." By his second appearance, the woman he imagines is there, standing beside him, watching. "He tried to believe that the tension in his body alerted her to the drama of the scene." Instead, she brashly asks, "‘You sure this isn’t a comedy?’"
In the novel, this almost perfect DeLillo exchange falls flat. In between the loner’s thought and the woman’s question is a jilted, two-paragraph description of the loner’s sudden worry over his hair and his contemplation of a French couple’s dinner plans. Similarly, the most compelling portions of Point Omega are squeezed between a narrative let down.
The in-between story is told by Jim Finley, a thirty-something filmmaker beached in the Southern California desert with the obdurate Elster, a civilian academician recruited to the Pentagon for his theoretical posturing in favor of invading Iraq. Finley pursues Elster for a film about his role in the Iraq war decision; Elster both rejects and encourages Finley’s pursuits. They stare at the desert all day while drinking scotch. At night, they eat omelets and stare at the desert some more. In characteristic DeLillo fashion, they have erudite conversations about the nature of time and war. "The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he’d always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past." After the tiresome prologue, it’s refreshing to be back in comfortable DeLillo territory, where the failure to aver anything is, paradoxically, an affirmation.
Elster’s daughter, Jessie, joins the two men, a sweet triangulation made ripe by Finley’s unique position in their ad hoc family. Elster confides in Finley that Jessie was sent by his ex-wife because, "There’s a man Jessie sees," an anonymous man, not a boyfriend necessarily, just a guy. Finley asks if they have sex. Elster says they talk. Finley observes Jessie in the bathroom, leaning down to wash her face, imagining "my knees moving her legs apart so I could press more tightly, fit myself up and in," and watches her while she sleeps. The three continue their quiet life in the desert, with Jessie as the shared point between the two.
DeLillo’s sleepy narrative jolts from its daydream when Jessie vanishes. Elster, the "man who still believes in the righteousness of war, his war," is flattened by her disappearance. Meanwhile, Finley attempts to propel their life forward, amidst search parties and sheriff’s calls, seeking the preternatural stillness so recently lost. Then, just as DeLillo seems ready to soar, he crashes hard, with unenlightened prose, into the loner’s tale of the beginning, the man watching Psycho unfold over the course of twenty-four hours.
Point Omega refrains from any grandiose pronouncements either condemning or condoning the Iraq war. Elster is simply a lonely man lost in perpetual thought. As philosopher Pierre Tielhard de Chardin noted (and whom Elster references), awareness and knowledge eventually catch up to themselves. The inevitability is a mirroring of consciousness that leads to an omega point of knowledge. Perhaps DeLillo is trying to hint that, after all the redacted testimonies are made public and the individuals involved are dead, history can finally and more accurately judge one of the U.S.’s most grievous foreign policy errors.
DeLillo doesn’t trust his reader to make the connections between the Finley-Elster-Jessie story and the loner’s and instead retraces faint connections between the two stories with thick black maker. Worse, DeLillo doesn’t seem to trust his own skills as a writer, one who has proven, with past work, that he knows how to haunt us with his language, providing that final, searing and unshakeable image, the sunken feeling in the stomach. The resulting mistrust is a story so capriciously transparent with its DeLilliean ideals the reader barely has time to slip in before being jerked back out again. Too bad, because somewhere in between is a story good enough to get lost in.
Lacey N. Dunham’s reviews have appeared in this, The Feminist Review and Altar Magazine. She studied writing at Hollins University and currently lives in Washington, DC.