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.