If we accept Harold Bloom's view, Don Delillo stands with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon as having produced a canonical work and being one of the leading American novelists of his generation. He also shares something else with them. He is producing his late work so-called because like these authors he is in his seventies and this work deals with finality in a subdued way.
Roth's recent run of four books from Exit Ghost to The Humbling collectively deals most directly with biographical and libidinal waning. McCarthy in The Road portrays the end of our civilization. Inherent Vice by Pynchon could be viewed as a symbolic end – an end to the era when Pynchon wrote his two best known works, Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49. Delillo's latest is like the first two novelists, a more overt meditation on life and death. However, the tone is all Delillo's, removed and cool, concerned with the suggested depths of surfaces.
Point Omega finds Delillo in a minimalist mood. It isn't only the prose which is restrained. The action is also subdued. I've often thought that Delillo doesn't write stories, rather he creates spaces in which mentalities interact. This latest has pared down this approach to three characters, the scholar Richard Elster, documentary film-maker Jim Finley and Elster's daughter Jessie. The three of them interact on Elster's secluded property in the desert, where Finley hopes to make a film about Elster. The film will be one long take of Elster, talking, or not talking.
Before the characters are properly introduced, the book opens with an anonymous viewer of the exhibit 24 Hour Psycho, “He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion.” This reflection about the artwork could also describe much of the mood of the book. That the unnamed viewer is watching the famous shower scene sets up a strange counter-image to the implied violence at the end of the novel. It also feels creepy and voyeuristic, compounding the remoteness.
The installation is also when Elster and Finley discuss the project for a second time. Their final meeting takes place at an unspecified time after this encounter in the gallery when the two men nut out what the film will be, and everything else besides. From this point Elster, as the interlocutor, and Finley, mostly in interior monologue expound on time, language, the body and power. Basically, the staples of theory for the last thirty years or so all get a nod. This conversational approach allows Delillo to do what he does best and that's create sentences which resound with a lyrical certainty whether you agree with them or not. The novel is peppered with these insights, many of them coming from Elster.
“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” Elster says to Finley at the very beginning of chapter one, immediately after the prologue featuring 24 Hour Psycho. When Elster is discussing the work he did with the US government in preparation of the invasion of Iraq, he says, “There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create.” As for the government itself, his view is summed up by “A government is a criminal enterprise[,]” for which “[l]ying is necessary.” This is classic Delillio – not just the cynical libertarianism, but also the rhetoric. These sentences were fashioned with quotation marks in mind, which is one of the works failings. Its parts often stand alone better than in the fabric of the story.
The story follows this pattern with Elster's pronouncements and Finley's musings about them. Like Finley's proposed film, the text hangs at a distance, so we never get an idea of what really motivated Elster. At one point, he tells Finley he wanted a “haiku war...a war in three lines...a set of ideas linked to transient things.” An arresting idea, but one which trivializes the war. I don't expect Delillo, or any novelist to moralize, yet the flippancy of the line may only reveal the inability of one person to come to terms with why his nation went to war – Delillo.
The arrival of Jessie does not do much to flesh out Elster. If anything she is only another subject for him to theorize about and so become even more disengaged, even though of all his children, Jessie is the only one he appears to have any affection for. At one point Jessie exemplifies Elster's problem with language. What she never becomes is a full character. Her glyph-like nature is even acknowledged by her father, who says that as a child she would always touch her own arm to confirm she was there. “She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.”
When Jessie inexplicably goes missing, Elster is confronted with a situation for which he has no rhetorical ploy. He ends up in a place outside of language. This end may suit Delillo more than Elster, since this writer has never been very comfortable with sentiment. Elster's grief becomes a pattern, a vigil of refusal. Finley's response is equally ritualistic. He is determined to continue doing what they did before. The tone never stops being remote and this is where the book fails for me. For once, in this situation especially, you would like it to drop its cool facade. Similar to the installation, which opens and closes the story, the story itself suffers because it has placed ideas at the forefront. Just as 24 Hour Psycho asks us to look at film differently, Point Omega asks us to consider its myriad themes in a new light. Yet, like the unnamed viewer of the exhibit, we are granted a view of only fragments.
the only delillo i've read is WHITE NOISE, and while i found myself admiring his work for its cleverness, the post-modern prose/narrative ultimately left me less involved than i'd like to be in a book.
sure, that may have been what delillo was trying to do, but there's only so much affection you can feel for a work that's keeping you at an arm's length.