Point Omega
Encyclopedia
Point Omega is a short 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 widely praised 2007 novel Falling Man
.
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. Line two of the haiku
structure (see below) winds up with the disbelief and grieving over Jessie; there are attempts to find her; there are references to a boyfriend or acquaintance named (maybe) Dennis. Jessie's mother had sent her to the desert to get away from this man. In light of this devastating event, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.
The novel is structured like a haiku
to provide the illusion of self-contained meaning.Lines one and three take place on September 3 and then September 4. The viewpoint is that of an anonymous man watching a work of conceptual art (24 Hour Psycho
) that involves Psycho
slowed down, broken down so that it takes 24 hours to play. The man mostly stands against a wall in the exhibition room and obsesses about the details and concepts of the work in hopes of willfully losing himself in Psycho (a kind of self-rendition). He attends the exhibition every day, all day. In Line one, Elster and Jim make a brief appearance. The man assumes they are academics, film critics and doesn't understand why they leave so quickly.
In Line two, we meet Jim and Elster and the main "action" of the novel takes place (temporally after Lines one and three). Jim is a filmmaker obsessed with the medium. His one previous work was, as his estranged wife remarked, a film about an idea. It seems to involve a pastiche of Jerry Lewis in performance mode at his famous telethons. Only Jerry Lewis appears in the film; only Elster will appear in the film Jim proposes to him. Elster refuses to agree to the idea but strings Jim along out in the desert where he does reveal a little about his intellectual provenance including his study of Teilhard de Chardin (whose principle idea is of a universe moving toward greater complexity and consciousness).
In Line three, Jessie goes to the Psycho exhibit and meets the man on the wall. She tells him her father recommended the exhibit. We already know that Jim recommended it to Elster and took him to the exhibit. The man on the wall tries to arrange a date with Jessie. He gets her phone number but not her name. Line three ends with the man returning to the exhibit.
The direction of the novel is the opposite of movement toward greater complexity and consciousness. It is toward a self-contained, self-defining and blind will to power. That is the idea behind the government's notion of war as haiku
. Elster's parsing of the word rendition is no different than Psycho in slo-mo: murder disassociated from its reality by clinical and abstract analysis. The novel's central metaphor is autism. The man on the wall (in either manifestation) and Jessie are obviously symptomatic. Jim and Elster are no better. The signs are there: Jerry Lewis
, Psycho in slo-mo, war as haiku
, the desert with Elster's solace in it as signifier for total annihilation, the word rendition.
There are clear parallels to Thomas Pynchon
especially in Gravity's Rainbow
. In Pynchon the tension balances along the relationship between knowledge (greater complexity?) and a death instinct; capitalism or western civilization as a death cult. In Point Omega the movement toward annihilation (rendition) is symptomatic of a defect or disturbance in mental process. We are truly in the age of autism.
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."
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 is set to give a first public reading of Point Omega at Book Court in Brooklyn
, New York at 7pm 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.
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."
Further praise came from the literary review Kirkus, with its reviewer declaring the novel to be "an icy, disturbing and masterfully composed study of guilt, loss and regret - quite possibly the author's finest yet." The Kirkus review further praised the novel's narrative as "crisp, precisely understated, [and] hauntingly elliptical"; approvingly drawing comparisons between Point Omega and Albert Camus
' novella The Fall; and that with this novel, DeLillo had moved "... a step beyond the disturbing symbolism of Falling Man
".
As with the Publishers Weekly review, Leigh Anne Vrabel's review for Library Journal
highlighted the quality of DeLillo's prose, stating that it is "... simultaneously spare and lyrical, creating a minimalist dreamworld that will please readers attuned to language and sound." Vrabel also praised the narrative of the novel, writing that "structural purists ... will appreciate the novel's film-related framing device, which wraps around the main action like a blanket and unifies the whole with a painful, poignant grace." The only slightly negative remark regards the novel's brevity, but the overall conclusion was highly positive: "though it be but brief, DeLillo's latest offering is fierce. An excellent nugget of thought-provoking fiction that pits life against art and emotion against intellect."
There were also negative notices from such publications as New York
, The National
and Esquire
.
In his mostly negative review for New York magazine's books section, Sam Anderson
struck a note of disappointment, puzzlement, and confusion. In Anderson's opinion, Point Omega is "[the latest of a] recent stretch of post-Underworld metaphysical anti-thrillers—The Body Artist
, Cosmopolis
, Falling Man—[showing DeLillo's writing] has reached a whole new level of [narrative] inertia". For Anderson, the novel's "glacial aesthetic" and seemingly slow moving non-plot of the novel is a major fault: "the closest the book comes to real action is when Elster’s daughter shows up—although “shows up” is a strong phrase to use for a character who hardly seems to exist at all. When she disappears, mysteriously — the only major event of the novel — it seems like a formality." The experience of reading a "late-phase DeLillo" novel, according to Anderson, makes him "... feel like a late-phase DeLillo character: distant, confused, catatonic, drifting into dream worlds, missing dentist appointments, forgetting the meanings of basic words, and staring at everyday objects as if they were holy relics." However, Anderson admits that "this disorientation might explain why I can’t quite make up my mind about Point Omega", suggesting some positives and elaborating that "the strongest material in Point Omega is only tangentially related to the book’s main story, and is essentially just art criticism" (referring to the bracketing chapters that begin and end the book). Anderson further remarks on the novel's style: "DeLillo is, after Beckett
and Robbe-Grillet, the indisputable master of grinding a plot to the brink of stasis and then recording its every last movement. Point Omega seems like a logical endpoint of that quest." But Anderson goes on to ask with some concern, "how much further into the desert of plotlessness is DeLillo willing to go, and how far are we willing to follow? Where else can he possibly take the novel?" Anderson finally concludes on a negative note: "I get the sense that he wants his oeuvre to culminate in a pure act of attention, and I’m not convinced that the novel is the best medium in which to do that. As a raging DeLillo fan, I’d be more excited to see him branch out to another genre—an experimental autobiography, or essayistic micro-observations of his favorite art and literature—than write another short novel about detached and largely interchangeable characters."
Writing for the "Friday Review" section of The National, Giles Harvey - like Anderson's review in New York - made much criticism of the stylistic tendencies of what could be termed as 'Late DeLillo', arguing that "... since the epochal 1997 masterpiece Underworld
... DeLillo’s books have come to seem lopsided, top-heavy: dense with cerebration but humanly thin." At his best, Harvey writes, "when [DeLillo] is...sending us dispatches from the front lines of contemporary experience ... DeLillo has few obvious betters. By comparison, most of his peers seem 50 miles back, in the hermetic opulence of some requisitioned château." However, in Point Omega, Harvey feels that DeLillo "... fails to make his characters more than ciphers for his ideas." Much of Harvey's criticism concerns the protagonists and characterisation. Of the retired war planner Elster, Harvey draws comparisons to Bill Gray in DeLillo's Mao II
and Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra
, but criticises DeLillo's characterisation for making Elster seem "... less a human being than a vague aggregate of ideas." Harvey goes on, "what’s missing from DeLillo’s presentation of human beings ... is emotional depth." Aside from the weak characterisation, the typical DeLillo black comedy appears to be watered down and a distilled re-reun of the humour from DeLillo's previous novels. The conversations that occur between Elster and his would-be documenter Jim Finley in the main body of the novel "... can sometimes be quite funny (although not nearly as funny as the screwball conversations on similar themes in Players
or White Noise
)". Further, Harvey finds fault with how, as he argues, "Point Omega was presumably conceived of as an emotional education – a story about a coldly intellectual man whose daughter’s disappearance leads him to recognise the limits of the intellect and his own human fallibility ... It is indicative of DeLillo’s failure that he should feel the need to state so baldly the novel’s intended emotional arc."
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
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 widely praised 2007 novel Falling Man
Falling Man (novel)
Falling Man is the title of a Don DeLillo novel, published May 15, 2007. An excerpt from the novel appeared in short story form as "Still Life" in the April 9, 2007, issue of The New Yorker magazine.-Plot summary:...
.
Plot
According to the ScribnerCharles Scribner's Sons
Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing a number of American authors including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon...
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
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
. "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. Line two of the haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
structure (see below) winds up with the disbelief and grieving over Jessie; there are attempts to find her; there are references to a boyfriend or acquaintance named (maybe) Dennis. Jessie's mother had sent her to the desert to get away from this man. In light of this devastating event, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.
The novel is structured like a haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
to provide the illusion of self-contained meaning.Lines one and three take place on September 3 and then September 4. The viewpoint is that of an anonymous man watching a work of conceptual art (24 Hour Psycho
24 Hour Psycho
24 Hour Psycho is the title of an art installation created by artist Douglas Gordon in 1993. The work consists entirely of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. As a result it lasts for exactly 24 hours, rather than the original...
) that involves Psycho
Psycho (1960 film)
Psycho is a 1960 American suspense/psychological horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins. The film is based on the screenplay by Joseph Stefano, who adapted it from the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch...
slowed down, broken down so that it takes 24 hours to play. The man mostly stands against a wall in the exhibition room and obsesses about the details and concepts of the work in hopes of willfully losing himself in Psycho (a kind of self-rendition). He attends the exhibition every day, all day. In Line one, Elster and Jim make a brief appearance. The man assumes they are academics, film critics and doesn't understand why they leave so quickly.
In Line two, we meet Jim and Elster and the main "action" of the novel takes place (temporally after Lines one and three). Jim is a filmmaker obsessed with the medium. His one previous work was, as his estranged wife remarked, a film about an idea. It seems to involve a pastiche of Jerry Lewis in performance mode at his famous telethons. Only Jerry Lewis appears in the film; only Elster will appear in the film Jim proposes to him. Elster refuses to agree to the idea but strings Jim along out in the desert where he does reveal a little about his intellectual provenance including his study of Teilhard de Chardin (whose principle idea is of a universe moving toward greater complexity and consciousness).
In Line three, Jessie goes to the Psycho exhibit and meets the man on the wall. She tells him her father recommended the exhibit. We already know that Jim recommended it to Elster and took him to the exhibit. The man on the wall tries to arrange a date with Jessie. He gets her phone number but not her name. Line three ends with the man returning to the exhibit.
The direction of the novel is the opposite of movement toward greater complexity and consciousness. It is toward a self-contained, self-defining and blind will to power. That is the idea behind the government's notion of war as haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
. Elster's parsing of the word rendition is no different than Psycho in slo-mo: murder disassociated from its reality by clinical and abstract analysis. The novel's central metaphor is autism. The man on the wall (in either manifestation) and Jessie are obviously symptomatic. Jim and Elster are no better. The signs are there: Jerry Lewis
Jerry Lewis
Jerry Lewis is an American comedian, actor, singer, film producer, screenwriter and film director. He is best known for his slapstick humor in film, television, stage and radio. He was originally paired up with Dean Martin in 1946, forming the famed comedy team of Martin and Lewis...
, Psycho in slo-mo, war as haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...
, the desert with Elster's solace in it as signifier for total annihilation, the word rendition.
There are clear parallels to Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
especially in Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973.The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest...
. In Pynchon the tension balances along the relationship between knowledge (greater complexity?) and a death instinct; capitalism or western civilization as a death cult. In Point Omega the movement toward annihilation (rendition) is symptomatic of a defect or disturbance in mental process. We are truly in the age of autism.
In his review for Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
, 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
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
-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 is set to do more press publicity upon the novel's release. One of these appearances was a PENInternational PEN
PEN International , the worldwide association of writers, was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere....
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
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. An extract from Point Omega was made available on the Simon and Schuster website on December 10, 2009. DeLillo is set to give a first public reading of Point Omega at Book Court in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, New York at 7pm 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
Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo is a Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule in China...
, 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
On the whole, reviews for Point Omega have been positive.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."
Further praise came from the literary review Kirkus, with its reviewer declaring the novel to be "an icy, disturbing and masterfully composed study of guilt, loss and regret - quite possibly the author's finest yet." The Kirkus review further praised the novel's narrative as "crisp, precisely understated, [and] hauntingly elliptical"; approvingly drawing comparisons between Point Omega and Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
' novella The Fall; and that with this novel, DeLillo had moved "... a step beyond the disturbing symbolism of Falling Man
Falling Man (novel)
Falling Man is the title of a Don DeLillo novel, published May 15, 2007. An excerpt from the novel appeared in short story form as "Still Life" in the April 9, 2007, issue of The New Yorker magazine.-Plot summary:...
".
As with the Publishers Weekly review, Leigh Anne Vrabel's review for Library Journal
Library Journal
Library Journal is a trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey . It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional practice...
highlighted the quality of DeLillo's prose, stating that it is "... simultaneously spare and lyrical, creating a minimalist dreamworld that will please readers attuned to language and sound." Vrabel also praised the narrative of the novel, writing that "structural purists ... will appreciate the novel's film-related framing device, which wraps around the main action like a blanket and unifies the whole with a painful, poignant grace." The only slightly negative remark regards the novel's brevity, but the overall conclusion was highly positive: "though it be but brief, DeLillo's latest offering is fierce. An excellent nugget of thought-provoking fiction that pits life against art and emotion against intellect."
There were also negative notices from such publications as New York
New York (magazine)
New York is a weekly magazine principally concerned with the life, culture, politics, and style of New York City. Founded by Milton Glaser and Clay Felker in 1968 as a competitor to The New Yorker, it was brasher and less polite than that magazine, and established itself as a cradle of New...
, The National
The National (Abu Dhabi)
The National is a government-owned English-language daily newspaper published in Abu Dhabi. The editor-in-chief since June 8, 2009 has been Hassan Fattah. Prior to this, and from the launch of the newspaper Martin Newland was editor-in-chief. Mubadala Development Company, an investment company...
and Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
.
In his mostly negative review for New York magazine's books section, Sam Anderson
Sam Anderson
Sam Anderson is an American actor.-Early life:Anderson was born in Wahpeton, North Dakota. He is a graduate of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. During the 1970s, Sam taught drama at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California.-Career:Anderson is perhaps best known for his roles...
struck a note of disappointment, puzzlement, and confusion. In Anderson's opinion, Point Omega is "[the latest of a] recent stretch of post-Underworld metaphysical anti-thrillers—The Body Artist
The Body Artist
The Body Artist is a novella written in 2001 by Don DeLillo. It explores the highly abnormal grieving process of a young performance artist following the sudden death of her significantly older husband. Freud's theory of melancholia appears to be a major inspiring principle underlying the work...
, Cosmopolis
Cosmopolis
Cosmopolis is Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel. It was published by Scribner on 14 April 2003.-Plot summary:Cosmopolis is the story of Eric Packer, a 28 year old multi-billionaire asset manager who makes an odyssey across midtown Manhattan in order to get a haircut...
, Falling Man—[showing DeLillo's writing] has reached a whole new level of [narrative] inertia". For Anderson, the novel's "glacial aesthetic" and seemingly slow moving non-plot of the novel is a major fault: "the closest the book comes to real action is when Elster’s daughter shows up—although “shows up” is a strong phrase to use for a character who hardly seems to exist at all. When she disappears, mysteriously — the only major event of the novel — it seems like a formality." The experience of reading a "late-phase DeLillo" novel, according to Anderson, makes him "... feel like a late-phase DeLillo character: distant, confused, catatonic, drifting into dream worlds, missing dentist appointments, forgetting the meanings of basic words, and staring at everyday objects as if they were holy relics." However, Anderson admits that "this disorientation might explain why I can’t quite make up my mind about Point Omega", suggesting some positives and elaborating that "the strongest material in Point Omega is only tangentially related to the book’s main story, and is essentially just art criticism" (referring to the bracketing chapters that begin and end the book). Anderson further remarks on the novel's style: "DeLillo is, after Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
and Robbe-Grillet, the indisputable master of grinding a plot to the brink of stasis and then recording its every last movement. Point Omega seems like a logical endpoint of that quest." But Anderson goes on to ask with some concern, "how much further into the desert of plotlessness is DeLillo willing to go, and how far are we willing to follow? Where else can he possibly take the novel?" Anderson finally concludes on a negative note: "I get the sense that he wants his oeuvre to culminate in a pure act of attention, and I’m not convinced that the novel is the best medium in which to do that. As a raging DeLillo fan, I’d be more excited to see him branch out to another genre—an experimental autobiography, or essayistic micro-observations of his favorite art and literature—than write another short novel about detached and largely interchangeable characters."
Writing for the "Friday Review" section of The National, Giles Harvey - like Anderson's review in New York - made much criticism of the stylistic tendencies of what could be termed as 'Late DeLillo', arguing that "... since the epochal 1997 masterpiece Underworld
Underworld (novel)
There are several novels entitled Underworld:* Underworld , a best-selling 1997 novel written by Don DeLillo* Underworld , a 1988 novel from the Dalziel and Pascoe series...
... DeLillo’s books have come to seem lopsided, top-heavy: dense with cerebration but humanly thin." At his best, Harvey writes, "when [DeLillo] is...sending us dispatches from the front lines of contemporary experience ... DeLillo has few obvious betters. By comparison, most of his peers seem 50 miles back, in the hermetic opulence of some requisitioned château." However, in Point Omega, Harvey feels that DeLillo "... fails to make his characters more than ciphers for his ideas." Much of Harvey's criticism concerns the protagonists and characterisation. Of the retired war planner Elster, Harvey draws comparisons to Bill Gray in DeLillo's Mao II
Mao II
Mao II, published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. It was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. The title is derived from a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints depicting Mao Zedong. This book was dedicated to DeLillo's editor, Gordon Lish.-Plot summary:A reclusive novelist...
and Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra
Libra (novel)
Libra is a novel written by Don DeLillo. It focuses on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and offers a speculative account of the events that shaped the assassination of President John F...
, but criticises DeLillo's characterisation for making Elster seem "... less a human being than a vague aggregate of ideas." Harvey goes on, "what’s missing from DeLillo’s presentation of human beings ... is emotional depth." Aside from the weak characterisation, the typical DeLillo black comedy appears to be watered down and a distilled re-reun of the humour from DeLillo's previous novels. The conversations that occur between Elster and his would-be documenter Jim Finley in the main body of the novel "... can sometimes be quite funny (although not nearly as funny as the screwball conversations on similar themes in Players
Players (novel)
Players is Don DeLillo's fifth novel, published in 1977. It follows Lyle and Pammy Wynant, a young and affluent Manhattan couple whose casual boredom is overturned by their willing participation in chaotic detours from the everyday.-Plot summary:...
or White Noise
White Noise (novel)
White Noise, the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, is an example of postmodern literature. Widely considered his "breakout" work, the book won the National Book Award in 1985 and brought him to the attention of a much larger audience. Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels...
)". Further, Harvey finds fault with how, as he argues, "Point Omega was presumably conceived of as an emotional education – a story about a coldly intellectual man whose daughter’s disappearance leads him to recognise the limits of the intellect and his own human fallibility ... It is indicative of DeLillo’s failure that he should feel the need to state so baldly the novel’s intended emotional arc."