Point Omega: A Novel

Sunsets were nothing more than dying light now, the dimming of chance.

This book is about times--personal time, film time, desert time, subliminal time, geologic time. It also forces on the reader a time dictated by the novel. Point Omega is exceedingly short, and the plot fairly shallow. The whole of the story could have been a vignette from Underworld: a film-maker would like to actualize his latest vision by filming non-stop the unscripted rambling of an ex-military intelligence man who purposefully lives completely isolated from the world he used to know, way out in the desert. The film-maker, the man and his daughter interact and some things happen. That’s it. But the plot isn’t what makes this book fantastic.

DeLillo opens in a show more room with a silent projection of the film Psycho playing at a speed which stretches the duration of the film to 24 hours, thus flexing film time toward its lower limit. The viewer must engage with the film, and the reader with the narrator, at this altered speed. The speed of the big city, or your school or family life gets co-opted by the multiple times of this novel--times much slower than most things. And then it’s over, quickly, because this magnificent novel is only 117 pages long. show less

Ever since I read White Noise, I've been hoping for another book from Delillo that is as funny and insightful. This one isn't bad at all, although it's a little short on the "funny". The "plot" (there's not a lot of action in this) involves a strategic defense consultant, named Richard Elster, who has retreated to his desert getaway after his stint advising on the Iraq War. The narrator is a film-maker who is trying to get Elster to make a Robert McNamara style interview film with him -- the film would be one continuous shot of Elster saying anything he wants, against the background of a blank wall. Elster resists, occasionally objecting that what the film-maker wants is a confession. At other times he deflects the conversation with show more quasi-cosmic reflections about the universe and time.

"Point Omega" refers to Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a kind of culmination of the history of the universe in a point of maximum complexity and maximum consciousness. The movement toward that culmination is not chaotic -- the universe is actively drawn to that endpoint. Its inevitability is mirrored by the framing chapters of the book, in which the narrator attends a museum showing of Hitchcock's Psycho, played at about 2 frames/second so that the movie takes 24 hours to play. Played at such a slow speed, there is an excruciating inevitability to the action -- e.g., the investigator Arbogast falling slowly but inexorably backwards down the staircase when attacked by Anthony Perkins.

At Elster's desert retreat his daughter comes to visit, sent by her mother (divorced from Elster), who wants to remove the daughter from a relationship she mistrusts. The daughter is so nondescript as to be almost not there. And finally she isn't. While Elster and the narrator go to town to get groceries, she disappears without a trace. Elster is broken by her disappearance and starts a slow (2 frames/second?) descent towards the end of the story. The film-maker returns Elster, now mostly immobile and silent, from the desert to face his ex-wife.

What do you make of all this? It's an apocalyptic vision. We are like Arbogast slowly, inexorably falling backwards down the stairs. Elster has seen through to the end -- "we want to be the dead matter we used to be". We'll reach the "omega point" where consciousness compels itself into some sort of dead self-rumination -- the reflective life of a stone that eventually has nothing left to reflect about. If Elster ever did the on-camera self-reflection he's asked to do, he would ruminate himself into disappearance. Like I said, it's a little short on the "funny".

Delillo's novels are great cultural commentaries, maybe the best of our time. Underworld is recognized as a modern classic, and White Noise is one of the best, and most entertaining, books I've ever read. If you want more of the "funny" and you haven't read it, try that one. show less

The work of highly successful artists is often described in the work's place in time relative to the artist's career. Thus you have early Picasso, late-period Beethoven. Sometimes the word vintage is employed as in, "*Jaws* is vintage Speilberg…" Writers seem to fare less well than their non-literary counterparts as their careers mature. Late-period Beethoven could be summed up by terms masterful, exquisite and revolutionary. Picasso never stopped innovating and only in very old age, right at the end, did he struggle and fail. My perception is that writers seldom get a glittering third act. Maybe time and further reading will prove me wrong. DeLillo seems to have the reputation of the artist whose best work is strictly in the show more rear-view mirror. I don't agree.

Centered on a trio of characters, this novella seems to vibrate with what must be a distinct Delilloness. I felt it in *White Noise* and I felt it here in this compact story of an experimental filmmaker (whose career it seems will never have a second act, let alone a late-period/vintage/revolutionary phase); a fading, retired military scholar — the intended subject of the filmmaker's new project; and the scholar's disturbed daughter. My overall impression is much the same as it was for *White Noise*. Somehow I sense that DeLillo is playing three-dimensional chess, and while I might be stuck playing checkers, I can feel the genius in his work. I will leave in-depth interpretation of the book up to readers more familiar with his entire body of work. All I can offer is an assertion that whatever skill you can identify on the page is just the tip of the iceberg. The uneasy, almost other-worldly quality and the characters which practically slip from the page they are so alive attest to much more going on than meets the eye.

If anything, reading this short work convinces me that DeLillo deserves a full hearing, that I owe it to him and to myself to read all his books. I started *Underworld* as a teenager, loved it even then, but stopped for whatever reasons. Let's blame it on the hormones. *Mao* and *Libra* have been on my (virtual) shelf forever. I will now try to make my way through the entire heap. I can't offer a higher recommendation than to say it makes me want to read more. show less

Delillo, a central figure of literary postmodernism, has such a reputation that even the thinnest of his books is expected to be compulsive reading.

Point Omega however, with its hundred or so pages is not much of a story. More a fait-divers, a single moment of time taking place in an isolated metal and clapboard shack lost in the middle of the desert. Critics have complained about the novel's brevity and its apparent lack of plot and weak characterization. They are wrong for they fail to see that this economy of means and props, rather than a sign of weakness, shows an immense talent at work.

Richard Elster, the main protagonist, is a scholar who has worked for the strategic department of the American Army during the Iraq war. Richard show more has retreated to his hideout in the desert. A young man, Jim Finley has joined him. Finley wants to make a documentary about Elster and his war –time experience. The film is supposed to be as spare as possible, just a man against a wall, a talking head. Days pass by, the two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. The film, we understand, will never be made, but the reader of course gets what the film is trying to record: the conversations, the opinions, the sayings of Elster.
Then enters a young woman, Jessy, Elster’s daughter. She is bit weird, a bit different. Elster explains that she is very intelligent and remarks that she can determine what people are saying in advance of hearing the words by reading lips. Jessy does not seem to fit in easily with the two men.

A drama is in the making.

Structurally, the desert part is framed between two chapters titled Anonymity and Anonymity 2, respectively dated September 3 and September 4. In these two chapters, one an intro, one a coda, we are in the near empty room of the museum of Modern Art in New York, where the conceptual artwork 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon is exhibited. In this artwork Alfred Hitchcock’s movie is projected on a big screen ( which can be viewed from both sides) but slowed down to two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. Instead of 109 minutes, it takes exactly 24 hours, at that speed to project the entire movie.

A man stands alone in the dark and looks at the movie. Because it is slowed down to that near static pace, he sees things you normally don’t see at a normal pace. While he knows the film by heart, he still discovers things for the first time.
But one senses that his fascination for this slow black and white stream of images is obsessive in a kind of awkward autistic way.

The two chapters taking place in the Art museum are not unrelated to the central part, the one which takes place in the desert. In the first part, two men enter the projection room, who we later understand to be Jim and Elster. Jim still has to convince the old man to participate in his film project. In the second part a woman enters and makes acquintance with the lonely viewer. We suspect the girl to be Jessy, Elster’s daughter, and the viewer might be her secret lover.

What do these two parts say about the middle piece or how do they improve the novel altogether?

The themes Douglas Gordon wanted to elaborate in his art work were supposed to be "recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light." This does not help much unfortunately. What I think Delillo’s purpose is, is to show what he is doing to the narrative in the middle section: slowing down time and action until it appears to be a standstill. Thanks to that we are allowed to see things we would normally not see, things which in the blur of the normal speed of everyday life would remain hidden. Imagine the four parts of the middle chapter as four movie “frames”. Time stands still and we can observe every image in their minutes detail.

While the negative critics mostly complained about the “slow moving non-plot” and saw it as a major fault of the novel, it didn’t bother me. The attentive reader can easily fill in the blanks. From a handful of lines emerges what could easily constitute a 1000 page tome. Elstir, the fallen Academic, has fled to the desert or hidden in the desert. He is ashamed or angry about his participation in the war machine. His daughter has a mental problem. She has probably inherited the bad genes from him. Elster could not save his marriage. It probably made things worse for his daughter. Jim Finley has run away too from a badly gone relationship. Too much occupied with his work etc etc. We understand it all. We, as experienced readers have read it all before. Delillo knows that, and therefore he doesn’t need to elaborate. He only has to find the right words, The few words we need to get the message.

How sure are we that our interpretation is right, that it reflects the story as Delillo meant it to be? It is not important, there are many truths and realities and each reader chooses his own.

More important for Delillo is that we understand other issues.

First of all, the three characters are lost. No Gps, maps or off road cars will help them find back a meaning to their lives. They have reached the end of the road. The desert enhances this feeling of isolation and helplessness.
Secondly, the different characters cannot communicate with each other. The father not with his daughter, Jim not with Jessy, the Mother not with the father, the partners not with each other. All their socialization and communication has come to a grinding halt.
Third, while biological sexual drive still pushes male and female towards each other, albeit in an awkward unconvincing way, the future is barren we understand, as barren as the desert around them. This could be the end of our species.

Autism is the metaphor of the book because autism is characterized by impaired social interaction and communication and by restricted and repetitive behaviour. The four characters in the Omega book all have a problem. 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.

We are, according to Delillo, truly in the age of autism.

A first obvious clue to understand what it is all about is the title. Point Omega is an idea conceived by the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ( 1881 -1955 ) in his law of Complexity and Consciousness.
Teilhard de Chardin was a paleontologist and geologist of international renown, who took part in the discoveries of the Piltdown and the Peking Men.
Observing evidences of the evolutionary history of the earth, Teilhard thought that matter would grow in complexity, from inanimate matter, to plant-life, to animal-life, to human-life and at the same time become more conscious.

He summarized his theory in his book The Future of Man (1950), and called it the law of Complexity / Consciousness, where the universe is constantly developing towards higher levels of material complexity and consciousness. The mechanism behind this evolution is a kind of gravitation towards a singularity, the Omega Point, a critical threshold, a supreme point of complexity and consciousness. And here comes the catch: this “suction” – force exists, transcendent and independent of the evolving universe. Teilhard is trying no less than reconciling science and religion. The Omega Point is Christ drawing all things to himself. At this point consciousness will rupture through time and space and assert itself on a higher plane of existence from which it can not come back.

For Teilhard, the law continues to run today in the form of the socialization of mankind. The closed and circular surface of the earth contributes to the increased compression (socialization) of mankind. As human beings continue to come into closer contact with one another, their methods of interaction continue to complexify in the form of better organized social networks which contributes to an overall increase in consciousness.

It is an exciting idea: The 'Omega Point' of the title "...[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable."

Half way through the book, Elster summarizes it as follows:

He said, “Matter. All the stages, subatomic level to atoms to inorganic molecules. We expand, we fly outward, that’s the nature of life ever since the cell. The cell was a revolution. Think of it . Protozoa, plants, insects, what else?”
“I don’t know”
“Vertebrates”
“Vertebrates,” I said.
“And the eventual shapings. The slither, crawl, biped crouch, the concious being, the self-conscious being. Brute matter becomes analytical human tought. Our beautiful complexity of mind.”…
“What are we?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their war. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself the question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted; Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want . We want to be stones in the field.”

The protagonists have reached the Omega point and have come to a standstill. Immobilized like the desert and the stones around them.

One Critic remarked that “with his lean, spare and concentrated prose 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."
One of the protagonists will indeed disappear. Sucked into the ashes and dust of the desert? Disintegrated in something enormously sublime and unenvisionable ? Back to anorganic matter? No one knows. Another one has to be evacuated out of the desert in a state of total regression, nearly suffocating in his own organic slime as if pure intellect has reached the edge of what it can endure.

When criticized about the brevity of his novel, Delillo answered that this was not deliberate: "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen." This is obviously not true. There is meaning in such shortness especially if we set it against other post modernistic behemoths like “Gravity’s rainbow” or “Infinite Jest”. To convey whatever Delillo wants his novel to convey it has to be made short.

Delillo makes sure that the key for “the shortness” is to be found in the lines of the book and it is a second clue as how to understand it.

Somewhere early in the second part falls the word haiku. A haiku is a very short form of Japanese poetry written in three lines of respectively 5, 7 and 5 “sounds”. The haiku expresses in a classical shape a “moment” of “experience”. A Haiku is a thimble full of emotion without any space for descriptions or analysis.

Is Delillo’s book a haiku?

The shortness and the three parts seem to indicate that this is the intention.The novel is structured as to provide the illusion of self-contained meaning. Lines one and three take place on September 3 and then September 4. The desert part is the middle line.

Once we reach point Omega, and we make abstraction of the religious emergency exit, then this book seems to say that to cope with greater complexity and consciousness, solace lies in the self-contained, self-defining idea of the Haiku.

That is why the real Sage, the man who has gone the way of the Mistic, the one following his via negativa does not need long discourses on why and what and who. A simple Haiku is enough and a Haiku is what Delillo has brought us with this book.

A few pages, a great book show less

One of the best American prose stylists alongside Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon, but often loses me in trying to figure out a plot, something the other two provide much more readily. We're meditating on time and war, and inverting the meaning of the omega point as the narrative shatters and people disappear from it. At the edges of the pervasive obsession with 24 Hour Psycho we can perhaps suggest a violent obsession and chance encounter as an explanation, but very little to that end is supplied. It brings to mind the heist aspects of The Passenger that sails away in an ejector seat leaving the implications of it all up to the reader. The Body Artist was similar in that regard, yet much clearer in having a tightened narrative of show more one principal and one secondary character, and their interaction being the canvas on which the themes were painted. show less

Reconozco que Don DeLillo ya me había llamado la atención en otros momentos, cuando leo las listas de novedades o los blogs, pero sobre todo cuando voy de librerías. Será por su nombre, así como de capo de la mafia, o por los títulos de sus libros. No lo sé; pero inevitablemente me sentía atraído por este nombre, teniendo que leer, inevitablemente, en qué anda metido. Y esto mismo es lo que me ha sucedido con 'Punto omega', lo primero que leo de este gran autor norteamericano, título que me hacía guiños cada vez que andaba entre las estanterías de las librerías. Como no podía suceder de otra manera, y después de saber algo más del contenido del libro, acabé adquiriéndolo. Y, desde luego, no es una lectura que deje show more indiferente.

El inicio del libro es explosivo y sorprendente. Un hombre asiste diariamente a una exposición en el MOMA, el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York (exposición que se dio realmente, y a la que acudió el propio DeLillo en 2006, quedando igual de fascinado), en una de cuyas salas se representa un obra videográfica la mar de curiosa, 'Psicosis 24 horas'. Esta obra emite la película de Hitchcock en cámara lenta, en lugar de los veinticuatro fotogramas por segundo, alargarndo el film hasta una duración de 24 horas. La sala, sin asientos y prácticamente a oscuras, únicamente contiene la pantalla en la que se proyecta la película. Tras este inicio, la historia se traslada al desierto de Sonora, donde vive retirado Richard Elster, antiguo asesor del Pentágono, personaje al que pretende filmar Jim Finley para su nuevo proyecto, la grabación de todo aquello que Elster quiera contar sobre sus vicisitudes con el Gobierno durante la guerra de Iraq, en un único plano de su cara, solo respuestas sin pregunta alguna, teniendo como fondo una simple pared. Y para allá que se va Jim, para intentar convencer a este misterioso personaje. Durante varias semanas, ambos hombres vivirán en la casa de Finley, en pleno desierto, manteniendo conversaciones sobre el tiempo y el espacio, sobre la vida, y bebiendo bajo la luz de la luna, o a la sombra y protegidos del inmisericorde sol, donde el tiempo se dilata y parece no pasar, como sucede en la obra del MOMA. Hasta que un buen día Elster recibe la visita de su hija Jessie…

Esta es una novela para leer despaciosamente, empapándose bien de lo nos cuenta, y en la que brilla enormemente el saber hacer de DeLillo, que estructura perfectamente la narración porque sabe lo que nos quiere contar. He dudado entre darle tres o cuatro estrellas, ya que el final me dejó un poco fuera de juego.

Aquí dejo un fragmento del libro, en el que Richard Elster habla sobre lo que para él son las ciudades:

"Todo consiste en el tiempo, tiempo tonto, tiempo inferior, la gente mirando el reloj y otros artilugios, otros recordatorios. Esto es el tiempo que se vacía de nuestras vidas. Las ciudades se construyeron para medir el tiempo, para adaptar el tiempo de la naturaleza. Hay una interminable cuenta atrás. Cuando retiras todas las superficies, cuando miras dentro, lo que queda es el terror. Esto es lo que se supone que la literatura debe curar. Los poemas épicos, los cuentos para dormir."

O esta otra reflexión:

"Como comprenderás, no es cuestión de estrategia. No hablo de secretos ni de engaños. Hablo de ser tú mismo. Si lo revelas todo, si desnudas todos tus sentimientos, pidiendo comprensión, pierdes algo fundamental para tu noción de ti mismo. Necesitas saber cosas que los demás no saben. Lo que los demás no saben es lo que te permite conocerte a ti mismo." show less

This is a novel which enjoyed but might not be as appreciated by many other readers. This is the first book of DeLillo I have read although I have many, but not all, of his other works. It is very short (117 pp) and closer to a novella than a full length novel. It takes place in near the Salton Sea in Southern California which is a desolate area near a body of water of high saline content. The four characters are interesting but hardly convincing. One is a Bush administration Neocon apparently working on a general rationale for the invasion of Iraq. This happens to be the central character of the book. In reality there were no ultimate rationales for the war just an excuse to wage a war without fear of losing it. Men and women in show more uniform being expendable in reality and an acceptable loss on strategic terms. War schemers untouched by the reality of human death and amputated bodies. The book deals with a videographer who tries to document one of the unseen architects of the war (Richard Elster) as he retreated from the terrorist renditions that followed upon it. Lots of MIT & CAL Tech ruminations which culminate in Elster's own arrival at an Omega Point of Cosmic Consciousness which strangely wills to destroy itself. The Omega Point was an old idea from Teihard de Chardin where all of creation converges with the human mind in a super-consciousness. This new entity was God. This was considered by de Chardin as a mysticism of science, at least from the Jesuit point of view. Teihard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest. Elster in turn reshapes that theology into a Heideggerian flavored nihilism. For me, this novel is a chance for the author to try out some new ideas which may or may not work in some future novel. I was impressed by the book although knowing that few others would see the same value as I had, especially women. Delillo develops his own ideas of the the nature of the present temporal now, what is consciousness, and can personal subjectivity be so affected by experience that personhood itself is altered. No answers here, but only the recognition that aging and personal loss can force an examination of one's past actions and motivations. show less