The Sunday Times
February 28, 2010
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon

Point Omega opens in the summer of 2006 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where an installation called 24 Hour Psycho plays in a large, often empty gallery. The exhibit consists of Hitchcock’s seminal slasher film slowed down so that it lasts an entire day, until the “broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time”.

This proves a fitting opening to Don DeLillo’s 15th novel, where the dread unravels in devastating slow motion. As Janet Leigh steps into the shower on screen, two spectators enter, a dignified older man with a younger, casually clad companion. After a few moments, the bemused older gent stalks off, pursued by the other man. The action then switches to a house in the California desert, where the pair embark on an emotional duet that is half Samuel Beckett, half Newsnight. The older of the two is the home’s owner, Richard Elster, “a defence intellectual” who played a key role in planning the Iraq War. His guest is Jim Finley, a documentary film-maker whose sole film is about the comedian Jerry Lewis. Finley is ­trying to convince Elster to appear in a documentary about his involvement in the Iraq invasion, much as the famed film-maker Errol Morris did with Vietnam war ­architect Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.

Elster, a bone-dry intellectual who has written a scholarly essay about the etymology of the word “rendition”, proves an elusive prey. “A deathbed conversion,” he scolds Finley when asked to go before camera. “This is what you want. The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.”

Gradually, however, Elster opens up off screen. “A great power has to act,” he says in self-justification. “We were struck hard. We need to retake the future.” He explains, in a chilling echo of the real instigators of the assault on Iraq, that “lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability”.
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Elster is no Rumsfeldian stick figure, however. There is pain beneath the pomposity. However brash and self-assured he may at times seem, there is clearly a deep unease gnawing at him, a reason why he has fled to this harsh, remote terrain. “Time falling away. That’s what I feel here…time becoming slowly older.” The featureless desert is his “omega point”, a black hole where he might pass completely out of being and, ­conceivably, move beyond the pain and guilt of the war he helped wage. “We want to be the dead matter we used to be,” he claims against the bleak backdrop. “We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.”

Elster’s quest for self-nullification is forestalled by the arrival of his daughter Jessie, an unemployed woman in her mid-twenties who is fleeing a relationship with a domineering boyfriend back in New York. She is a strange girl, edgeless and almost silent. “She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends,” her father explains. “She was imaginary to herself.”

Finley finds himself attracted to her, but before he can make a move, the real reason for her visit becomes apparent in a startling turn of events. Finley and Elster are left baffled and undermined. The film shoot is over before it even began. All they can do is pack their bags and return to civilisation. “The story was here,” Finley finally understands, “not in Iraq or in Washington, and we were leaving it behind and taking it with us, both.”

While some may find Point Omega’s brevity and slow pace ­off-putting, the patient reader will uncover a devastating vein of ­disquiet running beneath its tomb-cool surface. As in his recent novel Falling Man, which dealt with the attacks of 9/11, DeLillo chooses to take an oblique approach to a topic that might be blinding if viewed straight on. Like a hidden picture in a bland canvas, Elster’s desolation is difficult to make out at first. Once lodged in the mind, however, it is impossible to forget.