Writer Don Delillo poses January 10, 2004 in New York. (Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images)Jean-Christian Bourcart/Getty Images
Point Omega By Don DeLillo Scribner, 117 pages, $29.99
Until about a week ago, I figured Facebook was good for little more than checking out how your high-school sweetheart is looking these days, being "poked" by near-strangers and convenient (if useless) one-click political protests. And then I came across a colleague's status update alerting his friends to the publication of Point Omega, Don DeLillo's new novel. The comments this announcement attracted were (unlike those relating to, say, the werewolf kid's abs in New Moon) thoughtful, respectfully contentious and, based on the publisher's description of the book, a little anxious.
The concern was based on the trend, over the past decade or so, of DeLillo producing increasingly static fictions, stories free of story, in which characters are stuck: stuck in revisited death ( The Body Artist), stuck in traffic ( Cosmopolis), stuck in midair ( Falling Man). Some commenters speculated that 9/11 had stolen DeLillo's ability to look ahead, the point of view of his arguably greatest works ( Ratner's Star, Underworld). Others wondered if the author's decision to populate his recent books with conceptual-artist main characters was showing where he wanted to go: less action and more theory.
For me, the worry was that DeLillo, one of the finest sentence-makers of the past half-century, had given up on being a novelist altogether to become an art curator. Far worse, he had started writing like an art curator.
From this Facebook pregame warm-up, I opened Point Omega to be immediately met by a discouraging scene: people entering the "cold dark space" of an art gallery to take a look at a work of conceptual art and then walking away moments later, unmoved. The art piece in question is (also discouragingly) about being stuck: a slowed-down version of Hitchcock's Psycho, stretched out over 24 hours so that every beat of its suspense is flattened, leaving the viewer "to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion." Is this DeLillo channelling some kind of postmodern Proust? Or is it a pulling of the academic leg, a return to the satire of White Noise, a joke about the empty insights that come from watching paint dry?
A page or two on, we realize this is no joke. More, we realize that if DeLillo has decided to take on curatorial essay-writing as his new vocation, he's pretty good at it. Also, that maybe watching paint dry - or a 24-hour version of Psycho - can, in fact, yield insight, or at least the shadowy outline of a character. As DeLillo has the man who returns day after day to watch the installation think: "Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind. He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?"
The "What was left" here suggests a man who has been divided, or perhaps subtracted, by experience. He wishes to watch but be unwatched. (From shame? A wish for invisibility?) He is a man who seeks a radical downshift in his relation to time. Why?
The author was right: These are questions for advanced students. They are also an ingenious way of introducing a character - the villain, in this case, or at least some embodiment of threat - without conventional listing of detail, without a trace of exposition. This may be chilly stuff, but it's smart as hell.
Then, in the next chapter, we get stuck again.
It comes with our meeting Richard Elster, now 73, a scholar who was recruited by secret engineers of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to be "a defence intellectual," someone to create "new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans."
Being a fly on the wall of the war room, Elster offers Jim Finley, a young documentarian, a juicy subject to base an entire film on. If only Jim can get Elster to talk on camera. Though the old man seems on the verge of spilling, for the greater part of Point Omega (not long, really, as the novel is only 117 pages), he seems to prefer sweating it out under the desert sun, where he has brought Jim for a presumed preproduction discussion. Instead, the young man spends a lot of time listening to the elder's (elder/Elster, see?) poetic articulations, like Martin Sheen sitting at the feet of Brando's Kurtz.
If this all sounds disconnected and a little odd, it is. And then, three-quarters in, Point Omega's cleared throat of a plot is heard when Elster's daughter, who showed up for a visit, inexplicably disappears. The authorities conduct a frustrated search. Finley and Elster, mutely altered, return to their lives.
By way of conclusion, there is a clever final chapter that brings us back to the super-extended Psycho and the man who repeatedly returns to watch it. To avoid spoiling anything, it can be said the novella ends with a joke about narrative suspense, though it's more of a curatorial joke than a satirical or actually funny one.
At one point, Finley recalls his wife asking him, "Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?" It's a good question. So good, the author invites us to ask this of his own offering. Is Point Omega serious (the clarity of the profound) or too serious (the obfuscation of the pretentious)? The answer largely depends on how far you can go with little jewelled phrases before you start to see the jewels, without a fully realized story to embed them in, as merely precious.
Andrew Pyper is the author of four novels, most recently The Killing Circle , which was selected a Notable Crime Novel of the Year by The New York Times.