Point Omega (2010)

Point Omega is a novel by the American author Don DeLillo that was published in hardcover by Scribner's on February 2, 2010. It is DeLillo's fifteenth novel published under his own name and his first published work of fiction since his 2007 novel Falling Man.

According to Alexandra Alter from WSJ, "the novel follows a filmmaker who is attempting to shoot a documentary about a professor who served as an advisor to U.S. war strategists during the Iraq invasion". It opens in a "dark gallery, where a mysterious onlooker watches a super slow-motion version of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho". The starting point for the novel came to DeLillo after visiting the Douglas Gordon 24 Hour Psycho installation at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006.

The novel derives its title from Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the Omega Point. According to DeLillo, it "considers the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable".

Plot

According to the Scribner 2010 catalog made available on October 12, 2009, Point Omega concerns the following:

In the middle of a desert "somewhere south of nowhere," to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar - an outsider - when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. This was prompted by an article he wrote explicating and parsing the word "rendition". They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts - to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create "Bulk and swagger," he called it. He was to conceptualize the war as a haiku. "I wanted a war in three lines..."

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character - "Just a man against a wall."

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits - an "otherworldly" woman from New York - who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. Jessie is strange and detached but Elster adores her. Elster explains how she is of high intelligence and remarks that she can determine what people are saying in advance of hearing the words by reading lips. Jim is sexually drawn to her but nothing happens except his watching her as a voyeur would. After the most pointed of such behavior Jessie disappears without a trace. There are attempts to find her, and references to a boyfriend or acquaintance possibly named Dennis. Jessie's mother had sent her to the desert to get away from this man.

In his review for Publishers Weekly, Dan Fesperman revealed that the Finley character is "a middle-aged filmmaker who, in the words of his estranged wife, is too serious about art but not serious enough about life" and compares Elster to "a sort of Bush-era Dr. Strangelove without the accent or the comic props".

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Altar described the novel as "a meditation on time, extinction, aging and death, subjects that Mr. DeLillo seldom explored in much depth as a younger writer."

Promotion and publicity

DeLillo made a series of rare public appearances in the run up to the release of Point Omega throughout September, October, and November 2009, and was set to do more press publicity upon the novel's release. One of these appearances was a PEN event in New York, 'Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the "War on Terror"'. This event was "an evening of readings and response, [with] Members and friends of PEN read[ing] from the recently-released secret documents that have brought these abuses to light - memos, declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees - and will reflect on how [America] can move forward as a nation."

An original short story unrelated to Point Omega entitled "Midnight in Dostoevsky" appeared in the November 30 edition of The New Yorker.

An extract from Point Omega was made available on the Simon and Schuster website on December 10, 2009.

DeLillo was set to give a first public reading of Point Omega at Book Court in Brooklyn, New York on February 11, 2010.

DeLillo made an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the main branch of the New York City Public Library in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009.

Point Omega spent one week on the New York Times Bestseller List, peaking at #35 on the extended version of the list during its one-week stay on the list.

Reception

Point Omega received generally positive reviews.

An early mostly positive review appeared on the website of Publishers Weekly on December 21, 2009. Reviewer Dan Fesperman praised the novel's style, stating that while "it's hardly a new experience to emerge from a Don DeLillo novel feeling faintly disturbed and disoriented... DeLillo's lean prose is so spare and concentrated that the aftereffects are more powerful than usual". Fesperman goes on to add that DeLillo "is at his best rendering micro-moments of the inner life, and "laying bare the vanity of intellectual abstraction." However, Fesperman writes that there are occasions when "the going gets a little tedious", and he compares the novel to a "brisk hike up a desert mountain — a trifle arid, perhaps, but with occasional views of breathtaking grandeur."