POINT OMEGA by DON DELILLO

I just had that distinct pleasure peculiar to that time in one’s life subsequent to a time of intense intellectual pressure of reading a novel for pleasure, the narrative unfolding in time with the blossoms on the magnolia behind the house in a space akin to the breathless, sweaty cool down after a long run on a hot summer’s day. Serendipitous synchronicity meant that I found “Point Omega”, the latest novel by one of my favourite living authors, Don Delillo, as I decompressed after exams in the public library. Published by Scribner, this text is sparse to the point of bordering on novella status. As I’ve heard Joan Didion say in an interview of her novel “Play it as it Lays”, a story that came to mind more than once reading “Point Omega”, writing in this telegraphic style, with short chapters and a lot of white space is much more difficult than most people intuit. Threading the fabric of the narrative with themes light enough to ensure the resulting garment breathes, yet still has tensile strength and a stylish sheen is a craft, and the author, like a good tailor, hones his skill at it over many years as has Delillo.

One such theme is sewn on like epaulets, one on each side of the main narrative, by entitling the preface and epilogue “Anonymity” and “Anonymity 2”, sections populated by a mysterious character who frames the ensuing encounter between a marginalized, wanna-be film maker and his desired subject of a film, a retired intellectual named Elster from the intelligence community, an encounter filling only four chapters. The defence consultant’s daughter comes to visit them in the Arizona desert, her time with them ending inscrutably. Connections to the frontispiece and ending text are mere hints and shadows, like waves of X-ray radiation that only later are developed so that a fracture in the bone can be seen. The violence of the desert landscape, family and film, intelligence and coincidence, all wrapped in paper like the cigarette smoked by that stalker of synchronicity, the war on terror.
Delillo is a master at incorporating other media into his narrative. I, now more than ever, want to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to see a videowork called "24 Hour Psycho" used as the setting for the beginning and ending of "Point Omega". As the title suggests, this exhibit is the film "Psycho" stretched and slowed to fit it’s running time to one day. The character that opens the book spends immense swathes of time in the room where it is screened, his cogitations caught on the page as they weave from one side of the film to the other, in sinister time with the silent screen showing images meant to be building a suspense familiar to an entire generation but impotent in this regard as each frame lingers, a discrete swathe of imagery. There is an irony here, showcasing Delillo's exquisite artistry, as these celluloid picture chunks, drained of their original neurotic foreboding, are used to help fabricate the creepy consciousness of the anonymous character, the resulting blanket of text smothering, swaddling the reader in the very same sort of suspense that stalked the audience with the shrieking violins of the shower scene in the original movie.

Not that "Point Omega" is solely about psychopathology, although that is one of the more interesting subtexts working at the micro-level of the individual. Another great strength of Delillo's writing is his ability to craft character detail deftly, while using those threads to sew together the big picture, giving the reader a macro-level socio-political commentary. Here again, he uses the description of another medium, the academic journal article, specifically one written by Elster, to advance an exploration of the practice of rendition by the American intelligence community. Our erstwhile filmmaker describes reading it prior to his sojourn to the desert in his attempt to convince Elster to appear in a one-man, one-take concept documentary talking about his experiences in the military-industrial complex. The published article is balanced, complete with a portrait of etymology, ideologically obscure motivation, and nested footnotes, against the stream of consciousness spool of ideas for this potential film documenting one man’s experience with politics of terror, a fine juxtaposition.

“Point Omega” may have been a quick summer read, yes, but it will occupy my mind for untold lengths. I highly recommend it. Also worth watching is Delillo reading from a CIA memo on torture.