Point Omega
Don DeLillo
 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. 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."