New West Book Review

Don DeLillo Stares Down the American Desert in “Point Omega”

By Jenny Shank, 2-15-10

Point Omega
by Don DeLillo
117 pages, $24

In his fourteen novels, Don DeLillo has investigated a wide array of subjects and characters, spinning gorgeous prose and inventive fiction from the story of a fictional rock musician (1973’s Great Jones Street), the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (1988’s Libra), and the preoccupations of a professor of “Hitler Studies” at a Midwestern university in his National Book Award-winning White Noise.  Throughout DeLillo’s diverse novels, certain themes repeat: terrorism, crowds, cult activity, and conspiracy theories, to name a few.  Following the publication of 1997’s sprawling Underworld, which many consider to be DeLillo’s masterpiece, DeLillo began to craft spare, novella-sized fictions, starting with The Body Artist in 2001. 

His new Point Omega continues in this vein, but also breaks new ground for the novelist whose last five books have largely taken place on the east coast, in and around New York City.  The main action of Point Omega takes place in the West, in the Anza-Borrego desert of California—if what happens in the novel can be described as “action.” Point Omega proves to be a beautiful, puzzling book, inverting the classic narrative of a troubled man coming to the desert to seek solitude and achieve clarity.  In this case, Richard Elster—a scholar and “defense intellectual” who consulted with defense department officials during the buildup to the Iraq war—brings company with him to the desert because he can’t stand to be alone.  He enters the desert a confidant man, expounding on his pet theories, but leaves it broken and unsure of what he believes after he experiences a disturbing loss.

Point Omega begins in a museum gallery screening “24 Hour Psycho,” which DeLillo notes in his acknowledgments is a “videowork by Douglas Gordon.” An unnamed man observes the work, a projection of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” “slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours.” The man becomes obsessed with the movie, and wishes he could see the whole screening uninterrupted, but the museum closes of course, so he comes when it opens in the morning and stays until it closes for six days straight.  Few others can endure the projection for more than a few minutes, but the man finds it to be a fascinating comment on the experience of time.  He thinks, “This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience.  This was the departure from the departure.  The original movie was fiction, this was real.”

The book then shifts from the gallery to the desert.  A young filmmaker, Jim Finley, has come to the California desert home of Richard Elster to try to convince him to participate in a documentary he wants to make.  (We later learn that Jim Finley was probably the man in the gallery at the beginning of the book.) Elster has retired from his government job, described in this way: “He sat at a table in a secure conference room with the strategic planners and military analysts.  He was there to conceptualize, his word, in quotes, to apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency.” Elster has now traded the “bulk and swagger” of the Pentagon for the “space and time” of his retirement in the desert.

Finley wants to make a film about Elster’s “time in the government, in the blat and stammer of Iraq.” Elster would be “the only participant,” his face filmed against a wall as he speaks about his experience, with “no interspersed combat footage or comments from others, on-camera or off.” The idea is reminiscent of the Errol Morris film “The Fog of War,” in which Robert S. McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense, discussed his recollections of the buildup to the Vietnam War, except Finley’s film would be even more stripped down.

Elster is glad for Finley’s company, and they spend full days together in the desert, Elster talking and Finley listening intently, but Finley can’t quite convince Elster to participate in his project.  Then Elster’s daughter Jessica arrives, throwing their artificial father-son dynamic slightly off kilter.  The three of them have intricate, philosophical discussions, but nothing much happens until one day when Jessica disappears.  The short novel concludes with another scene in the “24 Hour Psycho” screening gallery, featuring a woman who might be Jessica, and a man that might be the one who might have kidnapped her in the desert, if that’s in fact what happened.  The reader is left with a lot of mights and maybes, and I came away fairly puzzled about what I was meant to take from this spare, quiet drama.

That’s not to say that Point Omega isn’t enjoyable.  Can anyone describe a stretch of desert road in a more artful, simple way than DeLillo has when he writes of the “scribbled tar of repair work on the paved road”?  And DeLillo’s meditations on the desert are also mesmerizing, as in this passage:

“I began to understand what Elster meant when he said that time is blind here.  Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies.”

DeLillo achieves his effects with plain, simple words, which he puts together as he always has, in uncommon combinations, with great potency and rhythm.

It’s surprising that DeLillo hasn’t set a novel in the desert before Point Omega, given his interest in the writings of ancient Christian mystics, many of whom were desert hermits (he references The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century book of Christian mysticism, in Underworld and White Noise), and his fascination with nuclear weapons and bombs—so many missiles have been blown up in the American desert.  DeLillo doesn’t touch on the desert’s history as a proving ground, though he suggests it by having his war expert hole up there.  Point Omega leaves the reader parched for plot despite its lush prose, but DeLillo’s first foray into the desert is a welcome one.  Here’s hoping he returns to explore more of the desert southwest’s fraught history in connection with international wars.

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