This is the fourth DeLillo novel I have read but it still feels like I'm about to get into his fiction, as if I have been skimming through them when in fact I have read them like one is expected to read Shakespeare, reading every sentence twice or even more, to make sure I get all the funniness out of it. But it is that fleeting quality that also makes his novels, or rather, his paragraphs, so magical in their encounter with ones mind and heart and soul. It was in Underworld that these powers were fully unleashed, so that I read the book without attempting to keep track of the pages, the way one might do with the Bible, picking up the thing and trying to see whether the first paragraph that caught my eye was familiar, and deeming it not, reading on from there. Yet I kept surprising myself, encountering paragraphs I clearly remembered reading, surrounded by passages I could swear never having encountered. It is, so far, a book that can be read as many times as the very pages it contains.

I have in fact come to think of the later novels (post-Underworld) as sequels to the masterpiece, quite like estuaries proceeding from a generous source, and even though they are more complete, having within them that closure that I felt Underworld lacks (so does the Bible, and Shakespeare), they are just as gracefully fleeting, just as funny, just as endearing. White Noise, the only "early DeLillo" novel that I've read so far, felt like something different, dealing with a different, I don't know, world perhaps, than these later works. I'm about to get into those earlier masterpieces that are what DFW fell in love with, yet I am certain they will be better than these recent ones, not so much because I have an objection with them, but because Don delivers a fresh and unparalleled blow every time he strikes. What he repeats he repeats with grace, with the wisdom of a being inspired.

Point Omega (2010) is, very basically, his film novel, the way Falling Man (2007) is his 9/11 novel, and Underworld his cold war/baseball novel. The subject of the prologue is an anonymous man who is perhaps the only interested patron of an ongoing screening of an extended version of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie Psycho, one that runs for a total of 24 hours. The prologue is in fact just about that: a man standing in a museum, looking at a wall where barely anything happens, in black and white, morning to evening. 

In the movie, which I watched in light of the novel, a woman steals money from her company and is running away when she finds herself at a Motel, run by the titular psycho, Mr. Norman Bates. The motel is somewhere in the middle of nowhere, much like the quarters of Mr. Richard Elster, an “outsider, a scholar with an approval rating but no experience in government” hired by that same government to “apply overarching ideas and principles to such matters as troop deployment and counter-insurgency” and who has now resorted to a life in the desert, away from all the noise of the city. The ways in which the movie and the novel interact are too subtle to be explicitly outlined, just like the parallel and similarities one encounters while in DeLilloville, (numbers, garbage, chess, baseball, the Language (American), et cetera).

The mystery of the missing girl in Psycho is solved, but in Point Omega we leave the desert with neither girl nor answer. The mystery of Psycho is extended here indefinitely. The mystery that has here been solved is that of Elster, who at the beginning could say things like: “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.” Jim Finley, who had gone to the desert to make a movie about Elster, says this about returning to the city: “I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, and the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point  of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to a local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.”

The way DeLillo deals with mystery is by cultivating words and emotions and intimations around familiar ambiguities. When we meet the anonymous man again at the end of the novel, it is a wonder, that the man, this lonely man, is perhaps not so unfamiliar after all, that his standing here is not just a hobby. He has a relationship with the film much like Norman Bates’s with his birds, and the subtle face of DeLillo is smiling at us from across time and space, telling us: I knew you would make the connection.

Idk this wasn’t bad but it wasn’t wow either.  It’s a very quiet book + there were interesting musings on time and this slow motion installation of Psycho.  But I finished the book just wondering what the point of it was.

 

can't wait to reread this ,such a dissociative experience.