Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer at 177 pages than a novella, but not by much. Yet the reading experience with Point Omega rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums with weight. I’m a quick reader but you don’t read DeLillo fast; you taste, you savour. The pleasure is in the characters, always close to either collapse or ecstasy as a result of existential gravity. DeLillo’s oh-so-familiar prose is in top shape in this outing: the gliding sentences, the pared dialogue, the sidelong flights into the underside of reality.
The book begins with an unnamed obsessive watching a slow-mo replay of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy in a gallery. This is DeLillo at his art house best. Then the story proper kicks in: a young filmmaker staying in the desert with the subject he hopes to film, a scholar once co-opted by the American war machine to help conceptualize Iraq and rendition and all that nightmare. When the intellectual’s daughter arrives to stay, the plot deepens, and somehow by the end DeLillo has constructed a mini thriller puzzle even as he toys with subjects like identity and guilt and the human condition. I’m in awe of the perfection embodied in the execution.
Right now I’m feeling guilty because I skipped Fallen Man, DeLillo’s previous novel. If it’s half as good as Point Omega, I was a fool.
A master – of language, of ideas, of atmosphere, of modern story – at his peak. 4 stars.