Dense, philosophical, and satirical in its dealings with art, war, and the possible endpoints of human endeavour, Point Omega is DeLillo in distilled form. Socially conscious and intelligent in its approach, Point Omega is neither a dull academic affair or a traditional novel, instead emerging as ultimately a subtly experimental piece that offers hints of truths buried in its shimmering prose. 24 Hour Psycho as framing device works well, emphasizing the novel's preoccupation with time. This book is short enough to be read in a couple of hours, but really needs to be read at a slow pace, not really so you can give it concentrated attention, but so you can appreciate its dimensions, "be alive to what is happening in the smallest register."

Though well-liked enough already, I suspect this will grow in critical esteem and end up being one of DeLillo's best-regarded works in the future. It's nowhere near as slight as it might seem.

Possibly just a mathematical equation in which the time variable (normally constant) is reduced to 1/10 its original speed. You’re possibly getting the real essence of what is so now and so local that it looses its meaning and name.

But what happens when what you fantasize about interrupts your conscious reverie?

“We want to be stones in a field” p. 53

Don't really get it! Oh well!

Despre timp. Cu ecouri de Sebald.

This wasn't the best Don DeLillo novel I've read, but it was a good read.
I enjoyed the story (as short as it was) but I just wish there was more.
The whole time I was reading, I kept thinking that there was something missing...I still haven't figured out what that is yet.

While in college, I took it upon myself to start working through the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list (the 2006 version). I abandoned that fairly quickly when I realized it made me feel restricted in my reading habits, but not before attacking The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo. Ugh, awful. I think this book is a big part of the reason I stopped going through the list in the first place. I can’t even put my finger on why I didn’t like it, but I didn’t. It took me a long time to pick up another of his novels, and only then, it was probably because I found Point Omega at the dollar store (seriously! the dollar store! I thought it was an excerpt instead of the whole book but it wasn’t!).

At 117 pages, Point Omega is a quick read. And unlike The Body Artist (or at least, what I remember from The Body Artist, I blocked most of it from my memory), it doesn’t trip over itself in its attempts to be deep and philosophical. If you’ve never read DeLillo, he can take a fairly basic premise and just dwell on it for a bit. In Point Omega, a filmmaker wants to make a documentary about a now-retired scholar who helped choreograph the Iraq War. That’s it, that’s the entire story. Rather than accomplishing this, said filmmaker and said scholar waste away in the desert, pondering the purpose of life and other lofty topics. It’s not an exciting book, it doesn’t even excel at being a deep character study, but it’s well written so you can’t help but get caught up in it.

For the characters (all three of them), time seems to stop as they embrace the lives of hermits, and as a reader, you feel like time in the real world may have stopped too. After putting this book down, I almost felt drunk. That’s weird, I know, but don’t you feel that way sometimes when you’re reading? Not tipsy, but more like “what just happened? Am I in my apartment or am I actually in the desert with these people? Oh, did I miss Jeopardy already? Wait, how did I get home?”

Point Omega is hard to describe beyond that; every description I thought of feels contradictory. It rambles, but it’s concise at the same time. It features emotionless, robotic characters, but somehow they’re still empathetic. It forces you to look at ordinary things in a new light, but it also tells you not to bother. There’s no denying that DeLillo is a wordsmith, but he’s not for everyone. That being said, I’d certainly recommend it. Like I said, contradictions all around.

(Originally posted on my review blog Mark It Read, copied to Goodreads).

This book feels more like an impression than a full novel. It is brief, but it has a considerable weight. Intriguing.