Book Review: Point Omega

Published on Friday 5 March 2010 18:03

POINT OMEGA: A NOVEL by DON DELILLO Picador, 224pp, £14.99

IN 2006, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed a video-work by Scottish artist Douglas Gordon: 24 Hour Psycho.

In a cold, dark room, with no seating, the Hitchcock movie was shown slowed down from 24 frames per second to just two, making it appear almost immobile, revealing detail invisible in a normal viewing while abolishing the dynamic qualities that make it such a compelling thriller.

Don DeLillo went back to see 24 Hour Psycho again and again, thinking that "a piece of fiction might spring from this experience".

Such extreme slowing, DeLillo suggests, gives us a whole other way to see and to think. "Things seem intensely what they are, broken down into atoms, into motes of light, as if seen for the first time". The less there is, the harder we look.

Point Omega is a short book but one that demands very slow and attentive reading, followed by re-reading. For, surprisingly, it's both a rarefied novel of ideas and also, albeit obliquely, a murder mystery.

It opens with a scene, set on 3 September 2006, titled "Anonymity", describing an unknown man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York obsessively watching both the film, at the point at which Norman Bates does for Janet Leigh in the shower, and at the other people looking at the exhibit. They include two men: one older, carrying a cane, "professor emeritus perhaps, film scholar perhaps", the nameless man speculates; the other younger, in jeans and running shoes, "the assistant professor", he imagines.

The two men are, we gradually realise, the focus of DeLillo's central section, to which this is the prelude. The elder, Richard Elster, is 73, DeLillo's own age, incidentally. He's a "defence intellectual" who, for three years, worked for the Pentagon to help "conceptualise" the Iraq War. A bit of a Paul Wolfowitz figure then.

Now he has retired to the desert in a remote part of California, where he drinks and pontificates about geological time and the burden of consciousness. "Do we have to be human for ever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field." For he believes in "the rule of extinction", mankind's arrival at the "omega point", a term devised by the heterodox theologian Teilhard de Chardin who tried to reconcile paleontology and faith.

Listening indulgently to him is Jim Finley, less than half his age, a frustrated movie director, who wants to make a film of Elster talking about his activities for the government, standing in front of a wall, completely unedited. Elster doesn't want to do it but Jim's attempt to persuade him turns into a protracted stay out in the desert.

Then Elster's daughter Jessie comes to join them, having been sent by her mother, who's worried about a strange man she has met. Jessie, mid-twenties, is a peculiarly wispy girl, "her father's dream thing". And she suddenly disappears, leaving no trace – until a knife is found in the desert.

Elster collapses. His big talk seems "so much dead echo now" to Jim. "The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body." He becomes frail and beaten, "inconsolably human".

In a coda, we go back, this time to 4 September 2006, to the 24 Hour Psycho exhibit, where the nameless man is watching again, not merely identifying with Norman Bates but hoping to dissolve into him, "to be assimilated, pore by pore". And there's a young woman there this time. Thus does paranoia stir. All remains uncertain but there are sinister intimations, hidden connections.

Point Omega is another formidable construction by a very distinctive writer, folding together disparate events in an intricate way to create profound unease. Here he appears to be using the slowed film to ask us to look again at our usually unalterable existence in time. "Every lost moment is the life ... It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live for ever."

Cryptic and abstract, mannered and a little chilly, Point Omega is unmistakeably a late work – from a great original nonetheless.