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Don DeLillo
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Point Omega: A Novel Paperback – December 14, 2010

by Don DeLillo (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 223 ratings
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A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld can tell it.

In this potent and beautiful novel, the writer The New York Times calls “prophetic about twenty-first-century America” looks into the mind and heart of a scholar who was recruited to help the military conceptualize the war.

We see Richard Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker and by Elster’s daughter Jessica—an “otherworldly” woman from New York. The three of them build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal grief, and it is a human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    128 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    December 14, 2010
  4. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.3 x 8.44 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1439169969
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1439169964
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A splendid, fierce novel by a deep practitioner of the form…. Enlivening, challenging, harrowing and beautiful.”—Matthew Sharpe, Los Angeles Times

"If Underworld was DeLillo’s extravagant funeral for the twentieth century, Point Omega is the farewell party for the last decade.... DeLillo has …. written the first important novel of the year."--Michael Miller, New York Observer

“A novel of ideas — about how language, film and art alter what we think of as reality. It's for readers ready to slow down and savor the words. It's for those who would watch not just Psycho, but ponder the meanings of ‘24 Hour Psycho’.”—Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today

“DeLillo is, without any doubt or qualification, one of the most influential, brilliant, gifted and insightful of American novelists. There are sentences in this book that are breathtaking.”—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

“Haunting… DeLillo slows down the whole culture, all of our repertoire of artifacts, words, and gestures.”—Greil Marcus

“DeLillo has achieved a precision and economy of language here that any writer would envy.”—David Ignatius, Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Reprint edition (December 14, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1439169969
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439169964
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.3 x 8.44 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 223 ratings

About the author

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Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo

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Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
223 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Federico (Fred) Moramarco
5.0 out of 5 stars An engaging, mysterious, haunting and beautifully written gem
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2010
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I found this to be a mesmerizing book, DeLillo's best, I think, since Underworld. I was disappointed by his last three efforts: Falling Man, The Body Artist, and Cosmopolis, although the latter had its moments. But here he sharpens his sentences with a laser and sandwiches a tale about a filmmaker who wants to make a documentary about one of the architects of the Iraqi War between two episodes of "Anonymity," the same filmmaker watching a video installation called "24 Hour Psycho" (an actual video work which showed at the Museum of Modern Art in Summer 2006) in which the Hitchcock film is shown in ultra slow motion to screen in 24 hours instead of 2. There are a number of interconnections between the two stories having to do with men and relationships, psychological dependence, filmic reality versus actual life, fathers and daughters as opposed to mothers and sons, imagined and actual violence, and the obsessions of the artist to get things right. It's filled with the kind of insights we've come to expect from DeLillo. Like this: "I wondered what he meant by everything. It's what we call self, the true life, he said, the essential being. It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever."Or this: "If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself." I'd have liked to have seen the middle story--depicting the filmmaker, the Iraqi war architect and his daughter--fleshed out a little more fully. It's sort of a teasing mystery that doesn't quite get worked out, but then again, that's part of its allure.
14 people found this helpful
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Doctor Moss
4.0 out of 5 stars Short on the Funny But a Good One
Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2010
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Ever since I read White Noise, I've been hoping for another book from Delillo that is as funny and insightful. This one isn't bad at all, although it's a little short on the "funny". The "plot" (there's not a lot of action in this) involves a strategic defense consultant, named Richard Elster, who has retreated to his desert getaway after his stint advising on the Iraq War. The narrator is a film-maker who is trying to get Elster to make a Robert McNamara style interview film with him -- the film would be one continuous shot of Elster saying anything he wants, against the background of a blank wall. Elster resists, occasionally objecting that what the film-maker wants is a confession. At other times he deflects the conversation with quasi-cosmic reflections about the universe and time.

"Point Omega" refers to Teilhard de Chardin's idea of a kind of culmination of the history of the universe in a point of maximum complexity and maximum consciousness. The movement toward that culmination is not chaotic -- the universe is actively drawn to that endpoint. Its inevitability is mirrored by the framing chapters of the book, in which the narrator attends a museum showing of Hitchcock's Psycho, played at about 2 frames/second so that the movie takes 24 hours to play. Played at such a slow speed, there is an excruciating inevitability to the action -- e.g., the investigator Arbogast falling slowly but inexorably backwards down the staircase when attacked by Anthony Perkins.

At Elster's desert retreat his daughter comes to visit, sent by her mother (divorced from Elster), who wants to remove the daughter from a relationship she mistrusts. The daughter is so nondescript as to be almost not there. And finally she isn't. While Elster and the narrator go to town to get groceries, she disappears without a trace. Elster is broken by her disappearance and starts a slow (2 frames/second?) descent towards the end of the story. The film-maker returns Elster, now mostly immobile and silent, from the desert to face his ex-wife.

What do you make of all this? It's an apocalyptic vision. We are like Arbogast slowly, inexorably falling backwards down the stairs. Elster has seen through to the end -- "we want to be the dead matter we used to be". We'll reach the "omega point" where consciousness compels itself into some sort of dead self-rumination -- the reflective life of a stone that eventually has nothing left to reflect about. If Elster ever did the on-camera self-reflection he's asked to do, he would ruminate himself into disappearance. Like I said, it's a little short on the "funny".

Delillo's novels are great cultural commentaries, maybe the best of our time. Underworld is recognized as a modern classic, and White Noise is one of the best, and most entertaining, books I've ever read. If you want more of the "funny" and you haven't read it, try that one.
8 people found this helpful
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Miguel
3.0 out of 5 stars I Liked it i think
Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2010
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This is an aerated novel that wants to be a condensed, stylized short story, or maybe even a play... It is a novel that is supposed to be finished in the reader's head, completed by all the connections the reader finds between the long aftershocks of Bush's war on terror and the modern-day obsession with images and information flickering across screens large and small... I do wish it were longer - that is, I wish DeLillo had more omnivorously taken in the contemporary moment and fed it into the gears of his literary intelligence, because his spare rooms and stark screens are too concept-driven, too slight for the monumentality of his observations... But I will take what I can get from the master.As a raging DeLillo fan, I'd be more excited to see him branch out to another genre--an experimental autobiography, or essayistic micro-observations of his favorite art and literature--than write another short novel about detached and largely interchangeable characters.
15 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Alberto
5.0 out of 5 stars confronto it-eng
Reviewed in Italy on December 2, 2016
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avevo letto su carta Point Omega in italiano. La traduzione mi aveva spinto a supporre che l'originale dovesse essere diverso da come mi veniva proposto. Ho acquistato l'e-book originale e mi sono confermato nelle mie ipotesi. Di per sé Point Omega è un capolavoro assoluto che esige tuttavia lettori consapevoli delle questioni poste al mondo dall'arte americana contemporanea
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Carrie Lynn
5.0 out of 5 stars Still loving Don DeLillo ...
Reviewed in Canada on June 27, 2013
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Short and sweet, but thought provoking and full of classic DeLillo quotables. DeLillo doesn't "just" give you a story, but hands you a delicious puzzle to play with.
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Kindle-Kunde
5.0 out of 5 stars Gut und schnell angekommen
Reviewed in Germany on April 24, 2012
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Das Buch hatte ich schon gelesen und war von ihm mehr als überzeugt, daher bestand kein Zweifel am "Artikel" selber.
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Mingo Bingo
5.0 out of 5 stars Short, challenging and incredibly well written
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 27, 2010
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On the title page the words "A Novel" follow on from "Point Omega". This seems an almost willful act of confrontation. Point Omega is not a novel, it's barely a novella, maybe even a long short story. But maybe it's length is as much a deliberate comment on the themes of the book as the words contained within.

It is an ostensibly simple premise.

A filmmaker, Jim Finley, visits an old man, Richard Elster, in a house in a desert, to convince him to be the subject of his latest film. The old man was an advisor in the Iraq war, a scholar not a warrior, whose job it was to form an intellectual frame work for the war. Finley stays with Elster for a number of days and they talk deeply. Elster's daughter, Jessie, visits and then abruptly vanishes.

This story is bookended by scenes of a man (probably Finley, but this is never disclosed) obsessively viewing an art installation called '24 hour Psycho', which slows down the Hitchcock film so that it lasts for exactly 24 hours.

And that is it.

But what you get in this intense and deeply affecting piece of writing is a study of the nature of time; how it affects us as humans, how our concept of time is affected by our locations, and ultimately how we use use our time on Earth.

DeLillo also looks at the purpose of art, and in particular film, as a medium to discuss the frailty of human existence. In this way Point Omega references his earlier short story Baader Meinhof. In themes and style it is reminiscent of his early novels such as White Noise. This is not the indulgent, wide reaching DeLillo of Underworld. This is a writer taking one specific point and using all his creative faculties to produce something crystalline.

There are very few contemporary writers who can tackle subjects with such clarity and focus, and then delineate their thoughts with such precise prose.

So, it's a short book, but it doesn't matter. It says just what it needs to say in order to be effective.
5 people found this helpful
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Seth Burkett
4.0 out of 5 stars Omega point
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 29, 2014
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I often find DeLillo's work dull and hard to digest. Having read the blurb I expected an action-packed, fast-paced novel. I didn't get it. It was only when I was mulling over the book having finished it that I truly appreciated the message behind the work. I'd now rate this as my favourite DeLillo novel. Give it a go- if you don't like it then its so short that it doesn't really matter...
2 people found this helpful
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