Author:  Don DeLillo
Title:  Point Omega
Publisher:  Scribner

On page 13 of his new book Don DeLillo writes, "It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at." I apparently wasn't paying close enough attention while reading this book, though I piously tried.

Point Omega is simple enough and short enough. Measuring only 117 pages in length, DeLillo sandwiches his main story, written in four chapters, between two, mostly unrelated segments titled, "Anonymity," and "Anonymity 2." In these two bookends an unnamed character is engrossed in a video display at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. A room has been dedicated to show Psycho, the famous movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The film has been slowed down to two frames per second to fit into a 24-hour run time. The character watches this movie day after day, frame after frame, examining the nuances of minutiae as if this were the only way the movie, and life, could be truly understood and appreciated.

The middle story revolves around three people—Richard Elster, his daughter Jessica, and a filmmaker, Jim Finley. Together they eek out a dismal existence in a trailer in the Nevada desert. Elster, a conservative intellectual, has moved there to get away from society and the inner turmoil that came from his last job at the Pentagon helping strategically plan the Iraq war. Finley tracks the old man down and is intent on getting the existential thinker to agree to be the object of a one-man film. He wants to stand Elster up against a blank wall as a background with no script, no time constraints, and no direction. It is to be the ultimate pulpit to the world. Yet Elster has no energy for it. He has come to the end of his life and is happy to share his philosophies—a sentence here and a sentence there—between alcoholic stupors with the film maker, but never with the camera rolling.

Elster's daughter, Jessica, inserts herself into the story on a trip to visit her father in the desert. She is present long enough to disrupt the philosophical conversation between the two men and then disappears from their lives and from the pages of the book. It is then the filmmaker, knowing he will never get his movie made, notes that all of Elster's remarks about human consciousness become nothing more than a dead echo—"All of man's grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not."

I wish I felt bad for sharing too much of this story's plot, but for a book that is supposed to be about the end (the omega), DeLillo doesn't really make a resounding point. Though this author isn't exactly known for feel-good stories, he goes out of his way in this story to consume all hope, pleasure, and meaning of life—like a black hole that gradually, relentlessly devours everything.

What the book did accomplish was to slow me down. I deliberately reduced my reading speed, taking in these 117 pages in the same time a book twice this length normally takes me to read. DeLillo's prose is purposeful, intelligent and sometimes mesmerizing. His suggestion that we may miss something important when life goes by so fast may be very true—I just wish he'd have found something of value in those contemplative times to share with us. 

**This review first published on February 22, 2010.