… (I haven’t read it yet) is getting bad reviews. Here’s the most thoughtful I’ve seen so far, in New York Magazine. It agrees with the other critics that the book’s too short, too cold, too static.
Point Omega, like 24 Hour Psycho [an art installation featured in the novel, in which the Hitchcock film is slowed down to a running time of twenty-four hours], offers many uncategorizable points of entry — which is to say that nothing much happens, and it happens very, very slowly. The book is narrated by Jim Finley, an unsuccessful thirtysomething director of conceptual documentary films. (His first movie consists of 57 minutes of old Jerry Lewis footage spliced together to a soundtrack of random sounds.) Finley has chosen as the subject of his next film the 73-year-old Richard Elster, an intellectual who has just finished helping the U.S. government plan the war in Iraq—although he’s done so in the most abstract and DeLillo-y way possible, as a kind of guru responsible for giving long oracular speeches that sound something like this:
“Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It’s human consciousness located in nature. It’s the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war. I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what’s there.”
Elster has retired from the war effort to take a “spiritual retreat” in the middle of the California desert, where he fills his days with poetry, sunsets, and even more oracular speeches. Finley visits him there, hoping to persuade Elster to participate in the documentary. Speechifying ensues, much of it about Elster’s obsession with an idea he calls “omega point”: humanity’s secret collective desire to wipe out the burden of human consciousness forever with some kind of cataclysmic event.
The closest the book comes to real action is when Elster’s daughter shows up—although “shows up” is a strong phrase to use for a character who hardly seems to exist at all. “She was sylphlike,” Finley tells us, “her element was air.” Or, as her father puts it: “She was imaginary to herself.” When she disappears, mysteriously—the only major event of the novel—it seems like a formality.
None of the reviewers has mentioned Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit philosopher who originated the term and concept omega point. I’m wondering if the novel gets explicit about Teilhard. I’m also wondering, given descriptions of the novel, whether anyone has made a connection between Point Omega and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which also features a young man battling to encounter an older man (DeLillo puts the older man in a desert; Conrad puts him in a jungle) who speaks to him about horrors.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:17AM
This all actually echoes certain elements of _Infinite Jest_, I think.
January 28th, 2010 at 9:33AM
J.: Interesting. Say more.
January 28th, 2010 at 10:03AM
Okay, I haven’t read the new DeLillo, and it’s been a while since I’ve snuggled up with _IJ_, but the first thing that jumped out at me is this apparent emphasis on film. _IJ_ doubles as the tile of James Incandenza’s famous film where the audience is taped as they look at the screen that is broadcasting the tape as it’s being made. And the film obviously goes on for as long as anyone remains seated in the theater. In the end, though, nothing really happens in the film, which seems to be one of the comments that people are making about DeLillo’s new book (and about _IJ_, to a degree).
Also, the whole younger man looking for a connection with an older man treads the same ground that we cover in _IJ_. After all, James fries himself in the microwave, leaving Hal without a father figure.
January 28th, 2010 at 10:32AM
Hmm. Or, should I say Oy.
January 28th, 2010 at 12:05PM
I think his best novels are a happy medium.
The shorter ones (Cosmopolis, Body Artist and now PO) are generally poorly received and are basic fragments of ideas. Underworld, as UD said years ago, was the novel he thought he *needed* to write. The Names, Americana, WN–all 300 or so pages–allow his ideas to flourish but are not over-inflated.
I think most people pick up the shorter books and never come back OR they do Underworld cause of the size/scope and don’t get his best work.
January 29th, 2010 at 7:56AM
Poor Teilhard – to go from being one of the original pop-theologians to being ignorable! I thought of him as soon as you mentioned the term. It’s hard to believe anyone could write a serious review without at least a sentence that says “The omega point, not the same as the conception of popular mid-century theologian….” or something.