Point Omega

Instead, the men spend nights outside under the desert sky, drinking liberally, and rhapsodizing in the idiosyncratic brand of dialogue that the author continually makes both glib and compelling. In one of these conversations Elster says, “War creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for the plotters, the strategists. Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies.”

When Finely narrates that Elster “chanted the words, he intoned liturgically,” an experienced DeLillo reader thinks: Yes, of course, this is the author’s inimitable style, which lays bare our false orthodoxies; which shows how the confidence of power, of secret knowledge, contains its own kind of vanity.

But this progress toward Elster’s eventual confession is interrupted by the arrival of Jessie, Elster’s daughter. When a potentially tragic event occurs, everything changes. The novel speeds up, but it leaves the characters even more adrift.

“Point Omega” is bookended by descriptions of characters observing “24 Hour Psycho,” Douglas Gordon’s video-work that appeared at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. The installation consisted of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “Psycho” slowed down to two frames per second and projected on a translucent screen hung in the middle of the room so observers could watch the attenuated video from both sides. This arrangement allows to the viewer to see the film’s mirror image on the screen’s opposite side and to examine previously hidden inconsistencies. DeLillo describes the installation well – in a series of frames showing an empty staircase, “suspense is trying to build but the silence and stillness outlive it” – but there’s an austere vagueness that matches the chapter titles of “Anonymity” and “Anonymity 2.” The moving images are slowed down so much as to be not indelible but opaque.

And such is the frustrating experience of reading “Point Omega.” Gesturing at some of DeLillo’s great themes and introducing a potentially great character in Richard Elster, the book manages to be worthwhile. But at about 120 pages, it never gets where we’re promised: Elster’s testimony remains tantalizingly unheard. Like the mysterious man watching the video installation, who wants to watch the movie for 24 consecutive hours rather than stopping when the museum closes, the reader here is left desiring more. Because Jim Finley is right: a true account of the war’s planning is an important story indeed, even if it were to arrive packaged as fiction.

Jacob Silverman is a Los Angeles-based writer and a contributing online editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review.

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