Don DeLillo’s 2010 work Point Omega is a short novel on the Iraq War and how military planners are desensitized to the deaths they create thousands of miles away. Richard Elster is a retired "defense intellectual", whom the Bush administration brought in with a request to plan a short and sweet war. Jim Finley is a filmmaker, who wants to create an hour-long documentary on Elster, which will consist only of the old man talking in front of a blank wall. Elster invites his would-be interviewer out to his house in the remote Californian desert to talk about the project. While there, Elster’s daughter also visits and disappears. A man who could coldly plan a war affecting millions of lives breaks down when he loses a single person dear to him.

Bookending this central drama are two sections where a patron at an art museum watches “24-Hour Psycho”, a real-life installation by Douglas Gordon that slows Hitchcock’s famous film down so that it takes exactly 24 hours to play. Presented in such a light, the violence of the Bates Motel loses its horror, and instead DeLillo’s unnamed viewer starts to consider only the other details of the film like the actor’s choreography. It’s an apt metaphor for Elster’s defense planning days, when the bloody fates of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians took a back seat to dreams of an effective strike followed by glorious nation-building.

If you’ve read a lot of DeLillo before, you’ll find this work features much less of the meaningless conversations of his pre-millennium works (which depict a society overwhelmed by information and trivia), and rather more of the meditative, psychological studies of his first post-millennium work, The Body Artist. However, for me Point Omega is written in far too spare a tone, trimming everything down to novella size where dialogues and scenes are abandoned almost as soon as they’ve begun. After his mammoth 1998 masterpiece Underworld, DeLillo has been reluctant to take on anything of that size again and has been working at shorter spans. However, Point Omega needn’t have been a big book, I think it could have worked better just the length of the average novel. Elster talks about wanting "a war like a haiku, a three-line war", and DeLillo seems to have conceived the book as a homage to the haiku’s miniature, three-part format, but perhaps only because he couldn’t find it in him to take the book all the way.