This, certainly, is simultaneously DeLillo's shorthand and shortcoming. You see, DeLillo now apparently culls all of his dialogue from some strange dimly-lit alternate universe where stubbornly humorless men and women sit around drinking scotch and waving their arms in the general direction of infinity - as a vague, portentous symbol of futility in the face of everythingness. Yes, for sure, in this slender little volume (especially in the first half), you'll find Don DeLillo at his most obtusely self-parodic. In this compact and powerful novel, it is finally a lingering human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind. Then a devastating event throws everything into question. The three of them talk, train their binoculars on the landscape, and build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family.

Weeks later, Elster's daughter Jessica visits-an 'otherworldly' woman from New York, who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. Finley wants to persuade Elster to make a one-take film, Elster its single character-'Just a man and a wall.' There he is joined by a filmmaker, Jim Finley, intent on documenting his experience. He has retreated to the desert, 'somewhere south of nowhere', in search of space and geologic time. Richard Elster was a scholar-an outsider-when he was called to a meeting with government war planners, asked to apply 'ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counterinsurgency'.

Now, in Point Omega, he looks into the mind and heart of a 'defense intellectual', one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine. In his earlier novels, he has written about conspiracy theory, the Cold War and global terrorism. Don DeLillo looks into the mind and heart of a 'defense intellectual,' one of the men involved in the management of the country's war machine.ĭon DeLillo has been 'weirdly prophetic about twenty-first-century America' (The New York Times Book Review).

Point omega by don delillo