The work of highly successful artists is often described in the work's place in time relative to the artist's career. Thus you have early Picasso, late-period Beethoven. Sometimes the word vintage is employed as in, "*Jaws* is vintage Speilberg…" Writers seem to fare less well than their non-literary counterparts as their careers mature. Late-period Beethoven could be summed up by terms masterful, exquisite and revolutionary. Picasso never stopped innovating and only in very old age, right at the end, did he struggle and fail. My perception is that writers seldom get a glittering third act. Maybe time and further reading will prove me wrong. DeLillo seems to have the reputation of the artist whose best work is strictly in the rear-view mirror. I don't agree.

Centered on a trio of characters, this novella seems to vibrate with what must be a distinct Delilloness. I felt it in *White Noise* and I felt it here in this compact story of an experimental filmmaker (whose career it seems will never have a second act, let alone a late-period/vintage/revolutionary phase); a fading, retired military scholar — the intended subject of the filmmaker's new project; and the scholar's disturbed daughter. My overall impression is much the same as it was for *White Noise*. Somehow I sense that DeLillo is playing three-dimensional chess, and while I might be stuck playing checkers, I can feel the genius in his work. I will leave in-depth interpretation of the book up to readers more familiar with his entire body of work. All I can offer is an assertion that whatever skill you can identify on the page is just the tip of the iceberg. The uneasy, almost other-worldly quality and the characters which practically slip from the page they are so alive attest to much more going on than meets the eye.

If anything, reading this short work convinces me that DeLillo deserves a full hearing, that I owe it to him and to myself to read all his books. I started *Underworld* as a teenager, loved it even then, but stopped for whatever reasons. Let's blame it on the hormones. *Mao* and *Libra* have been on my (virtual) shelf forever. I will now try to make my way through the entire heap. I can't offer a higher recommendation than to say it makes me want to read more.

As much as I love White Noise, I think my interest in more DeLillo is rapidly waning. Everything he writes is a meditation on themes without a story. This is fine most of the time, but when it's the same theme(s) several times, it loses its appeal.
As always with DeLillo, the characters are types used to perform a function. They are tools, not actual characters with arcs or motivations. Sometimes they spout interesting or insightful sentences (though always in a sterile, clinical style) which is why this book gets its three stars: philosophically, it's intriguing. Probably my favorite passage from this slim text:
"The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion...the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field" (52-53).

It reminds me of Metallica's "Spit Out the Bone"

This is a novella with truly lovely intellectual craft. The Psycho bookends were by far the highlight for me. However, I think I missed the overall point slightly, and got lost attempting to figure it out. The style was a little bit self conscious (and maybe a bit pretentious). My first time reading Delillo, so maybe he just needs some getting used to.

Well this is a short read. And it isn't. Known for fluid prose and their often elusive meaning, DeLillo's works are not ones that can be easily grasped in their entirety by the unsuspecting reader. This may tempt one to pay special attention while reading this book, but don't worry, you won't get it in one go.

Point Omega is, amongst other things, a story about a 73-year old war intellectual and a young filmmaker who ponder about the limits of human consciousness and the vastness of its perception in a setting that also acts as a near perfect-metaphor for the same, a desert land South of nowhere. In a lonely cabin situated off the main road, with nothing but empty desert and local shrubs, the two characters sit down every evening to discuss the lived reality of human experience, defining life and one's sense of being not in the countless conscious streams of thoughts and activity, but in the unconscious reveries one finds themselves in at any given point on any given day - staring into blank space with abandon, with a brutal realisation of self that by paradox, is unconscious thought in its very nature. The same vein of paradox is carried in the very conscious scotch-fuelled evening discussions, and something time and again experienced and pondered over in great detail by the protagonist, as he finds himself wondering about the depth of human reflection while staring at receding silhouettes of distant hills in the desert twilight.

The very term 'omega point' is mentioned sparingly during the entire novel. Twice, maybe thrice at most, described as the innermost point towards which human conscious thought can go during self-reflection. At least that was my understanding of it. Considering this was my first DeLillo, and my first of the genre - my understanding and sense of sophistication on the topic thus being grossly limited - my translation could be way off the point.

Despite the sheer brilliance and fluidity of its prose (many demanding to be re-read countless times to pry their complete meaning), it is very easy to discredit this book as pompous and lacking substance in storytelling. If books were French films, then Point Omega would be a prime example of one, you have to read between the lines to grasp what's happening. And to appreciate it more, it'd help if one had a philosophical bent of mine. However, that's not saying that you can't still enjoy reading it if you lack both of the above (which I very much do). That's the beauty of its prose, and by extension, the brilliance of DeLillo as a writer. Despite the dream-like state of the first half of the book, there's also something very human about the characters, which leaves one with a sense of wonder. The same wonder one would experience in that brief moment when the French art film that had been elusive in its meaning up until now suddenly starts making sense. Only briefly though.

Throughout the book there are themes of time, the vastness of time, human consciousness, and to some extent, human imagination. For is it even possible to conceptualise such concepts without some degree of imagination, because isn't all thinking (conscious an unconscious) intertwined with imagination? There is a dream-like lull the book puts you into. There comes a point where you stop trying hard to understand and just read it in fluidity, the daily routines of characters and their discussions falling in easy rhythm as you turn page after page. Then, as soon as you get used to the lull, the rhythm, there is the 'incident', the introduction of mystery. You think, 'ah finally something is happening'. There was the before, and now there is the after. Unsurprisingly though, the book ends as abruptly as the mystery begins. Despite knowing that this is not the kind of book that tells you what happens, there is a reluctant cry of 'but what happened ?'. You're once again taken back to the brief commentary of time, of existing in time, being absorbed in time. As for the mystery itself, that's open-ended, and from what I've read, a classic DeLillo.

This is a two-hour read from an author whose books (White Noise and Underworld, especially) I admire. Point Omega, however, is less a novel than a long-form short story or even pamphlet, interesting, chock-full of ideas that evoke deconstruction and sterilization and probably annihilation, with just a passing reference to human passions. The work is a grim reminder that we're disconnected from the immensities of nature, burdened by the markers of time, and essentially just holding out for extinction of the soul. But a well-written grim reminder, it remains.

Excellent novella. I love DiLillo's novellas. They could be stretched to novel size, but he is so talented with words he can write 400 page books in just 100 pages. I also kind of think he writes novellas so that readers can easily finish them in one sitting. The story is much better that way.
This one grabbed me in the first chapter and just got deeper and deeper as it went.

wanted to read something by don delilo...it was kind of ok but boring...wouldn't recommend to anyone but I do want to read something else delillos.

This is my first Don DeLillo. I have heard and read so much about him, that reading this slim book was against high expectations to begin with.

Seems stacking the stakes - Don doesn't take lightly to that (!). While this is a slim book, it's even more obtuse and abstract (seemingly!) than other DeLillo's books. Overall though, it challenged me as a reader - to question what was I reading, why was I reading it, and what really was being told.

The narrative style is bare bones, and then some... Think of peeling an onion. Peel away layers until you reach the innermost bulb. This book is somewhat like that naked onion bulb. Take away all the superfluous elements of a novel, take away all character building, all background narrative, scenery description, and of course - do away with all but three characters. Four, if you count the voice on the other end of a long-distance phone call.

DeLillo writes about a General, who has seen the war machinery from the inside, and who knows how vain and pointless war is, and how much more vain and pointless are the folks in charge of the war machine. He should know. He was one of them.

The book begins off - as if in the middle of something else: again giving one the impression of there being some introductory pages of text that was brutally removed. Keep only what is core and essential to this storyline - the author demands.

As I read the slim volume, despite not liking it upfront, I couldn't let go. I wanted to know what a story like this can tell me. What those two characters can be doing in the desert, for so long. When the third character joins them, the story is still as bare-bones as ever, but there's a sense of foreboding that manages to come up. I couldn't really explain what was it - was it something one of them said (can't be, they hardly said anything straight).

That brings me to my biggest complaint with the book. No one speaks straight. No one talks to people. It was as if there were three people who like solitude, but happen to be near each other, and so a clever playwright wrote a play with them in each other's vicinity, but not really talking to anyone except themselves, no one really seeing anyone except themselves. They ask questions, and then answer it themselves. They pose a problem and then solve it themselves. Or worse, simply disregard it and move it, as if dripping of disdain at everything else and around.

The novel is intriguing, compelling (somewhat), challenging on multiple levels, and ultimately satisfying - precisely by being inconclusive in the end. This is not fiction - as if DeLillo seems to be saying to us. This is a slice of life, and life's not a straight line on a Euclidean plane.

Life is a doodle, and you can either marvel at it, or try to find its end / beginnings.

You pick.

And hurry up, while you're at it.