POINT OMEGA - Don DeLillo - Fiction

I'm working off a huge backlog of reviews--turns out it's easier to read books than to write about them, who knew?--so I thought I would start with the best, which is conveniently the most recently released. Go, read POINT OMEGA! Even if Don DeLillo put you off with FALLING MAN (which, to be honest, I liked a lot), there's something for the old-school UNDERWORLD fan in his latest. It's been said around the internet that its length might have something to do with its appeal (my hardcover version was around 120 pages) but my favorite fiction is the kind that can be expediently and expertly condensed, and this is quite the example. It's a pint-sized thriller that seems so simple in construction, but has such graceful, economized sentences that it's worth the multi-year wait between books for something like this.

The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.

The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.

The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.

Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.