Point Omega
In the middle of a desert ‘somewhere south of nowhere’, to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war adviser 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. For two years he tried to make intellectual sense of the troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young 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. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.
3.4 out of 5 based on 15 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
224 |
| RRP |
£14.99 |
| Date of Publication |
March 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0330512381 |
| Publisher |
Picador |
| |
In the middle of a desert ‘somewhere south of nowhere’, to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war adviser 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. For two years he tried to make intellectual sense of the troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young 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. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.
Read an extract from the book on the New York Times website
Reviews
The Times
Douglas Kennedy
"...the brilliance of the book lies in DeLillo never once announcing that we are in Grand Theme territory. On the contrary, this unapologetic novel of ideas has its own stealthy logic."
27/02/2010
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The Financial Times
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
"Powerful… Point Omega is not without some flaws. The characterisation is cursory, and there is a clumsy lurch into the gothic mode when DeLillo links the Psycho and desert scenes. But the high concepts about politics and art are seeded into the story sinuously, and the painterly rendering of the desert setting, with its “blinding tides of light and sky”, imparts a wonderfully eerie atmosphere. The tone registers American relative decline, but DeLillo’s powers show no sign of fading."
09/03/2010
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The Guardian
James Lasdun
"It sounds, perhaps, a bit obvious as a juxtaposition – Shock and Awe reprised through Psycho – but the handling is subtle and deft, and it works powerfully… [A] finely austere novel"
09/03/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Archie Bland
"...DeLillo has a far broader purpose, as he always does: to present a world in which perception and reality are one, and to suggest ways to navigate it. He is almost alone in the mainstream of American literature in ploughing this furrow, and his continued determination to do so borders on the heroic. This strange, slight, brittle fiction is a worthy addition to an extraordinary body of work."
09/03/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Matt Thorne
"While DeLillo’s disparate concerns don’t quite come together, Point Omega is a treat: the most satisfying and least cryptic of DeLillo’s late novels."
09/03/2010
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The Sunday Times
Stephen Amidon
"While some may find Point Omega’s brevity and slow pace off-putting, the patient reader will uncover a devastating vein of disquiet running beneath its tomb-cool surface."
09/03/2010
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The Washington Post
David Ignatius
"DeLillo has achieved a precision and economy of language here that any writer would envy. But the larger ambition of storytelling -- of bringing people and events to life for the reader through the power of the author's language and imagination -- is not even attempted. Indeed, it is disdained."
09/03/2010
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
"Although Mr. DeLillo extracts considerable suspense from his story, while building a Pinteresque sense of dread, there is something suffocating and airless about this entire production. Unlike the people in his most memorable novels, the three characters here do not live in a recognizable America or recognizable reality — rather, they feel like roles written for a stylized and highly contrived theater piece..."
09/03/2010
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The New York Times
Geoff Dyer
"“Too many goddam echoes,” Elster exclaims at one point, yet he himself is a character who seems — a voice that sounds? — like a ghost refugee from DeLillo’s earlier novels. The good bits in “Point Omega” keep reminding you of older good bits that turn out also to be better bits."
09/03/2010
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The Literary Review
John Dugdale
"In contrast to Mao II – which advances the powerful and much-quoted notion that terrorism has usurped art’s role – the cultural and socio-political strands of Point Omega don’t interact compellingly: what Psycho has to do with the invasion remains elusive to the end. And DeLillo appears aware that the ramblings of his desert hermit-prophet, his proxy in the novel, are bound to strike many as frustratingly abstruse."
09/03/2010
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The New Statesman
Leo Robson
"Often DeLillo's greatest strengths and most compulsive discoveries are hard to distinguish from all that is fraudulent and tiring in his work... A quarter-century and a vast difference in rigour and irony separate Point Omega from White Noise, Richard Elster from Jack Gladney"
09/03/2010
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The New Yorker
Books Briefly Noted
"This thin novel begins and ends with a brilliant analysis of an art installation consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” slowed down so that it lasts twenty-four hours. DeLillo seems to be instructing the reader: “The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it.” Most of this novel, however, is resistant to the reader’s focussed attention — it reaches for enigmatic profundity but meanders."
09/03/2010
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Times Literary Supplement
Ben Jeffrey
"Early on, Elster presents his concept of 'Haiku War': 'I wanted war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things'. It isn't too difficult to draw affinities between this and DeLillo's method in Point Omega: scraping away everything he can, conjuring a semblance of profundity while answering very little. The result is insubstantial by design, but overly so: a wispy anticlimatic enigma that also includes a spot of moralizing about the vanity of explanations."
09/03/2010
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The Spectator
Justin Cartwright
"There are some striking similarities to Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions as a young man arrives to try to inveigle Elster into giving him a long, free-form film interview on what he really knows about Iraq. An insurmountable problem with the novel now becomes apparent: Elster, for all his advance billing as a great mind, seems to talk absolutely incoherent rubbish."
09/03/2010
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