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    Point Omega: A Novel
    Point Omega: A Novel
    Point Omega: A Novel
    Audiobook2 hours

    Point Omega: A Novel

    Written by Don DeLillo

    Narrated by Scott Campbell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld can tell it.

    In this potent and beautiful novel, the writer The New York Times calls “prophetic about twenty-first-century America” looks into the mind and heart of a scholar who was recruited to help the military conceptualize the war.

    We see Richard Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker and by Elster’s daughter Jessica—an “otherworldly” woman from New York. The three of them build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal grief, and it is a human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

    Editor's Note

    A devastating beauty…

    Devastating in its beauty and simplicity, this slim volume is a meditation on time where past and future collide.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateFeb 2, 2010
    ISBN9781442300552
    Author

    Don DeLillo

    Don DeLillo is the author of many bestselling novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise, Libra and Zero K, and has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written several plays.

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    Reviews for Point Omega

    3.5/5

    333 ratings25 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Elegant writing but going nowhere. Mercifully short! The framing device is an art installation in which Hitchcock's Psycho is shown at an excruciatingly slow pace. This, for me, stands as emblem for the book itself: slow and pointless. Three main characters: narrator, a film maker dedicated to shapeless experimental film-making; his subject, an intellectual who advised the US government about Middle Eastern matters, now ageing and disillusioned (how exciting is that!); his daughter, who comes across as sexually attractive to the narrator but he does nothing about it, she says hardly a word and then disappears in suspicious circumstances, but then disappears from the story before anything is found out (bit like Antonioni's L'Aventura). De Lillo has been highly recommended to me; this first encounter doesn't lead me to seek him out further.
    • 3/5
      Hhhmmm not sure what I can say about this book to be honest. The hidden meaning of this story is really.....still hidden to be honest.The book starts with an unknown person watching an art film of Pyscho and ends the same way. In between you follow Jim Finley, a struggling film maker, trying to talk Richard Elster into making a film about his time as a war advisor. This he does on Eslter's house in the desert and hence begins the hidden story of hiding from the real world and the fact that nothing is really that important. The true reason for the trip he begins to forget and begins to watch as time seems to flow slower and less stressfully out in the dessert.After this Elsters daughter turns up and I cannot say more as this will then spoil the story...regardless to say the book ends up back at the museum and the film watcher. Who is then joined by someone who can read peoples lips and know what they say before they say it.I can't get my head around this book and I always feel like I am missing something in DeLillo's books when I read them. For me personally I am glad this was only 148 pages long - half way through this I already wanted to give up.
    • 4/5
      Idea-driven novels have traditionally been regarded as precarious. (It would be good to know the history of this idea; it was in force in the reception of Kundera in the 1980s, but it probably derives from the reception of 19th century realist novels.) "Point Omega" is very brief -- cleverly set by the designers at Picador, with a large trim size and ample kerning, so that it scrapes by at 117 pages. That brevity points to its conceptual nature, and so do the opening and closing chapters (12 pages and 16 pages) that describe Douglas Gordon's "24 Hour Psycho," the slowed-down video of the Hitchcock film.An idea-driven or conceptual or philosophical novel that is also brief runs a special risk, because the brevity declares that the resources of the full novel are not needed (no extensive character development, minimal psychological depth, minimal descriptive prose, a reduced capacity to be immersive absorptive). It announces, in effect, that the author has had an idea that needs to be put as fiction, but in such a spare way that it is only the novel's freedom of invention and narrative that matter. Here the opening rumination on Gordon's video introduces themes of patience, of not knowing what meaning something has, of listening and looking without judging, of being alone in reflection. The same themes reappear in both principal characters. Human connections are programmatically absent: both men are apart from their wives; the narrator doesn't quite connect with the only woman in the novel; in the end, the "anonymous" viewer doesn't quite connect with a woman he meets in the Museum of Modern Art. The video piece makes the experience of film unreal, and the desert setting of most of the book makes ordinary city life unreal, and both places are unreal in themselves. The book does sometimes behave like a longer, richer, less conceptually-driven novel, especially in the rare passages when DeLillo takes time to describe people or places other than the video screening room or the desert. The same effect, of the possibility of a different kind of novel, also surfaces when DeLillo inserts examples of alienated experience: a woman who walks downstairs backwards (p. 32), the extinct North American camel, the age of the universe. These function as condensed or tentative allegories of the book's themes.The widely distributed, apparently random moments of description and of allegory seem odd or imperfectly realized, just because there could have been many more of them: it seems DeLillo thought he had to be parsimonious because his book was short, but that also means every such passage attracts attention, and its placement, length, and motivation seem less secure.Philosophically, philosophical novels are problematic because the ideas they offer seem (I suppose mainly to philosophically-inclined critics) to be uninteresting as philosophy. In this case, the principal character has theories about how real life, real existence, is revealed when you attend to the low-level continuous sense that you're going to die. "Point Omega" proposes, in effect, that the temporal dilation of Gorgon's video, and the spatial and temporal dilation of the desert, can bring on that low-level awareness. In that state of mind, people become shells or tokens, their inner life inaccessible, their words unimportant, their physical existence insecure. Philosophically, it is not really news. And yet to say "Point Omega" "proposes" such-and-such a thing "in effect" is a way of saying it doesn't propose any such thing, because it doesn't propose anything, because it isn't about effect, because it's a novel.
    • 3/5
      An odd little book, but enjoyable. DeLillo has a point to make about observation, it's impact on the viewer and on the viewed. This is a book with voyeurs, artsy film screenings, star gazing and endless self reflection. I'm sure I haven't digested all of it, but you can't see without being changed.
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like _Point Omega_, and did like some things about it. I'm longing to go to the desert now. The deliberate drawn-out meditation on time and pace, however, made the book seem much longer than it really is. I may have to come back to it another time to give it a fairer shot, when I have a bit more patience and stillness of my own available.
    • 3/5
      Thin characterization seasoned with stale Pantheism masquerading as progeny of Notes from Underground or The Stranger.

      Writing a short novel with obscure unresolved issues doesn't make it a masterpiece. I couldn't shake the feeling that DeLillo thought he had written a modern companion to one of the above mentioned novels or The Trial or Metamorphoses or something like one of them; and, it had potential but it didn't get there. He wasn't able to bring it to closure.

      There's a line where a character quotes his wife as saying, "Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?" It's the punch line for everything wrong with a novel that takes itself too seriously and fails to be serious about anything.

      It's DeLillo devoid of substance.
    • 3/5
      A young filmmaker, Jim Finley, seeks out Richard Elster, an elderly scholar who was engaged by the government to provide ideas towards their defense strategies, who now spends most of his time in the desert. Jim's goal is to persuade Richard to agree to participating in a one-take film, where the film's focus would be Richard and his thoughts. His planned 2 - 3 day visit stretches into weeks and he starts to lose his own fervor for his film as he falls under the spell of the desert. Richard's daughter, Jessica, comes out for a visit and their conversations include instrospective observations. Before long, they are enveloped in a comfortable familial intimacy. And then a devastating and mysterious event occurs which shatters their cocoon. This novella has a still and stark beauty as the desert it is set in.
    • 2/5
      Very particular mix of the abstract and the intellectual level. Main character Richard Elster, a pseudo-Nietzsche kind of character, lives in isolation and ventilates his ideas about society and humanity in general. Jim Finley, the narrator and companion of Elster, seems to have no added value in the story. Basically, this part of the story features a lot of rambling, rambling that's interesting at times but seems very distant for the most part.

      DeLillo seems to try to approach reality through the unreal; sadly, his perception falls short and the story gets stuck in no man's land.

      Beginning and ending are much more fascinating. An anonymous man spends his days watching an art installation featuring the film 'Psycho' by Alfred Hitchock in slow-motion. The run time of the movie has been prolonged to twenty-four hours. Here, DeLillo seems to be more in his element.

      All things considered, a novella that tries to deliver more than it can handle.
      Not my cuppa tea.
    • 4/5
      Reading Point Omega one unmistakably feels one is reading a fine work of literary fiction, but the question is how deep the reader wants to go to uncover deeper layers of meaning.Literary criticism, such as on Wikipedia, reveals that Point Omega is a highly complex novel, offering alleys to very deep senses of meaning, as well as meaning found over a broad scope, involving various cultural references and hypertextuality. Uncovering those layers of meaning would take a very serious, and scholarly approach to reading, which shows us that Literature is a form of Art, capable of construing profound meaning, and recreating literature to take that position. Readers' and critics' unwillingness to follow the author into that labyrinth of meaning tells us more about the readers than about the author. No-one says a novel should be "user-friendly" or accessible to every type of reader, least of all the most complacent. With Point Omega DeLillo demonstrates that literature can still be great art, and for all we know, in a hundred years time Point Omega will be canonized as the ultimate novel to understand the early Twenty-First century.To readers who do not want to fathom the deepest recesses of meaning, Point Omega can still be read as a thriller, although style and structure, would have it classified more with literary fiction, than the genre of ordinary thrillers.
    • 3/5
      Usually I don't write spoilers, but most of the other reviewers seem to have entirely misunderstood the framing device and it's relationship to the plot. So: * * * * * SPOILERS * * * * * - In the opening chapter, we meet Dennis, who is obsessively watching 24-Hour Psycho. He sees Jim and Elster, briefly. - In the closing chapter (the next day) he meets Jessica and gets her phone number.- Sometime after that chapter ends, Dennis starts calling Jessica. It's not clear what happens in those calls, or whether they meet again.- Then the middle chapter begins. While its events are taking place, Jessica's mother (who sometimes picks up the phone and hears no answer), decides something isn't right, and sends Jessica to her father's place in the desert.- In the middle of the second chapter, Jessica arrives at the house. Dennis eventually comes after her, they leave the house together, and (presumably) Dennis kills her, as Norman Bates kills Janet Leigh. The knife is found by the police, but not a body. Jim & Elster leave the desert.* * * * * END SPOILERS * * * * * I don't know what I think of this novella, but it wasn't boring, and the last chapter was a little bit of a twist.
    • 3/5
      Don DeLillo's latest is a brief, cryptic and thought-provoking novel which references the Hitchcock classic, "Psycho", as well as more contemporary traumas like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and divorce.
    • 3/5
      This is a novella about, well, hm, not sure quite sure what. Mostly, I think, it seems to be about the post-9/11 condition in the United States, although there are few direct references to the event. It is mostly about a filmmaker who is trying to make a film about a scholar, but something goes horribly awry during the process (no spoilers here.) I found the first 20 pages or so to be nearly unbearably pretentious and stilted (maybe on purpose?), but the final part (the "horribly awry" part), is very compelling and beautifully written, and somehow does capture that sense of loss and sense of security that many of us have felt in the last decade or so, even though the "story," such as it is, has only a tangential relationship to 9/11 and the subsequent Iraq War. Keep in mind that there is no real plot here, mostly a situation, and I think the book has more to do with the feeling rather than what happens (or not.) I can't say I loved it or maybe even liked it, but I will probably come back to it in the future, there's just something haunting about it that I can't quite shake off.

      I bought it at the Barnes and Noble at Union Station in DC, needed something to read in a hurry, and read it over a few days on various forms of transportation.
    • 3/5
      Several interesting things and a good writing style, but hardly worth buying at the exorbitant price it was first offered. Worth borrowing from the library.
    • 4/5
      Sandwiched between scenes that take place in an art museum in front of an installation of "Psycho" that plays soundlessly and slowly over 24 hours and is witnessed day after day by a single “psycho,” is the story of a father-daughter relationship and a pseudo father-son relationship played out against a desert back-drop.Jim Finley is a young film maker with one avaunt garde movie to his credit about Jerry Lewis, “a man on a mission from God.” Now he wants to make a literal “talking head” movie about Richard Elster, wordsmith, civilian advisor to the Bush Administration on the Iraq War, now retired – at least, retreated – to a decrepit house in the desert where he wishes only to contemplate his life and slow time. So Finley goes to live with Lewis as a houseguest, ostensibly to research his subject.After a time, Elster’s daughter Jesse joins them from NYC, sent by her mother who is trying to separate Jesse from what she (the mother) regards as a sick, obsessive boyfriend. Then one day, Jesse disappears.Time collapses for Elster, his world comes to an end. Elster’s “omega point.”The novel’s final scenes take place once again in the gallery where the “psycho” stands in front of "Psycho" as he has done day after day. Only this last day of the exhibit, a woman enters and speaks to him. From clues, we are led to understand it is the thought-dead Jesse – or could be her.DeLillo has constructed a dreamy introspection that examines the nature of love, time, aloneness, and seeing using motifs such as film to emphasize the dual and ephemeral quality of point-of-view, understanding, and reality. “Human perception is a saga of created reality.” Ultimately, he asks, can we ever know what is truth; what is right, or wrong? Can we depend on words to give our world meaning when the definition of those words change with time and need? I'm reminded of Umberto Eco who shares a love for complexity in his own fiction, uncertainty as a character trait of his heroes, and a deep philosophical regard for language and the meanings of words.A novel so rich and dense, I need to read it twice. (Heh heh.) Great writer, want to read more of his stuff.
    • 5/5
      Sunsets were nothing more than dying light now, the dimming of chance.This book is about times--personal time, film time, desert time, subliminal time, geologic time. It also forces on the reader a time dictated by the novel. Point Omega is exceedingly short, and the plot fairly shallow. The whole of the story could have been a vignette from Underworld: a film-maker would like to actualize his latest vision by filming non-stop the unscripted rambling of an ex-military intelligence man who purposefully lives completely isolated from the world he used to know, way out in the desert. The film-maker, the man and his daughter interact and some things happen. That’s it. But the plot isn’t what makes this book fantastic. DeLillo opens in a room with a silent projection of the film Psycho playing at a speed which stretches the duration of the film to 24 hours--film time slowed way down. The viewer must engage with the film, and the reader with the narrator, at this altered speed. The speed of the big city, or your school or family life gets coopted by the multiple times of this novel--times much slower than most things. And then it’s over, quickly, because this magnificent novel is only 117 pages long.
    • 2/5
      Despite strong reviews, I found it disappointing in some regards, almost too spare; yet its tone and mood is one of spareness, not quite despondency, but an intense search for meaning, an almost obsessive desire to slow time down
    • 2/5
      Dear Simon and Shuster, Please, stop publishing the cobbled-together writer's workshop pieces from authors with famous names. Sentence structure is insufficient to compell one to the end of a novel (which, Point Omega happens not to be). Guys like DeLillo have little to say anymore. Also, I respectfully submit that the appeal of neurotic, white, males in America, along with their attendant anxiety is worn and faded. Maybe, if there was some kind of limited digital release to AARP members? There must be an app for that. Sincerly,The rest of the reading public.
    • 1/5
      Slow, dull and pointless, a tired retread of DeLillo's earlier works examining the noise of information, reality, pop culture, etc. Characters are bland and shallow, plot is meandering and poorly explained, the themes remain underdeveloped and sloppily tied into the novel. Maybe avant-garde diehards will love it, but I found it to be a very uninteresting read overall. At least it's very short at only 115 pages.
    • 4/5
      This is my first DeLillo, and it is a very, very good novel. As I wrote elsewhere, if an unknown writer had written this book, we would read it in awe, but for DeLillo, it has to stand up to his entire oeuvre.The only weakness in this novel is the character Jessie, but she almost works. Or maybe she does work. I haven't made up my mind yet. In any case, the limitations of her character do not get in the way of novel.I recommend watching clips from '24 Hour Psycho' before and after reading this.
    • 2/5
      I have and read and thoroughly enjoyed Libra, White Noise, Underworld, and Fallen Man, but this book did not work for me. The introspective esoteric style of Don Delillo works for a large book but so dominates this short novel and creates tedium. The 117 pages seemed like 1117 pages. If this had been a longer novel I would have never have finished it. It was much too vague and I needed some resolution to what happened to the daughter. Too much for me "to get it".
    • 4/5
      This is a short book.A ne'r do well film maker journeys to the isolated desert house of a former US government official. He hopes to make a bare bones interview documentary a la Errol Morris' "Fog of War". The official seems to become unhinged and a visit from his daughter tightens the strings of tension.Emblematic with the narrative are his visits to "24 Hours Psycho" - a slow motion exhibit of the Hitchcock film.
    • 4/5
      This was a quick engaging read that took me in more and more over the course of the reading. Brought together with careful character sketches/constructions and lyrical prose, DeLillo's work here was both memorable and thought-provoking. It stood up to (and perhaps even surpassed) the works of his I've read in the past, and I have no doubt that it's a work I'll come back to. It's something you'll likely read in one sitting, and it will likely also stick with you. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      Mr DeLillo must have been left exhausted by his work on the huge sized and hugely brilliant woirk Underworld, as his subsequent books have been somewhat less chunky. This is a very slim volume that is still packed with brilliance. You can read it in a few hours and then sopedn the next few days pondering it!
    • 3/5
      Don DeLillo is a masterful writer. To me, the best of his fiction has helped to define and illuminate some of the most significant events in the past 50 years of the American existence: the JFK assassination (“Libra”), the Cold War (“Underworld”), and 9/11 (“Falling Man”). Those books remain some of the most memorable novels I’ve read; in fact, the first 60 pages of “Underworld” represent the most compelling story-telling I can recall.It was with considerable anticipation then that I read “Point Omega.” Unfortunately, it was not a wholly satisfying experience. The main story—and one has to use that term loosely in this case—involves an aging intellectual who has retreated to the California desert after his involvement in helping to plot the Iraq invasion and an unsuccessful filmmaker who has come to try to convince him to appear in a documentary about his association with the Pentagon. As their time together in the desert drags on, the film project is forgotten with the arrival of the intellectual’s daughter. The mystery of her subsequent disappearance provides the novella with the aspects of a thriller. This plotline is framed in the opening and closing chapters with the New York screening of “24 Hour Psycho,” an art installation in which Hitchcock’s classic movie is slowed down to last for a full day. The disjointed images on the screen and elongated sense of time become a metaphor for the entire book.I found all of this to be both contrived and more than a little implausible. There is very little in the way of character development through the story and so it really becomes nothing more than a vehicle for making the point that, as a nation, we appear to reaching the end of our time (i.e., the “omega point” of the title). What redeemed the reading for me, however, was the fact that DeLillo is just so good with some of his depictions—particularly in the desert scenes—that it is easy to be carried along for the duration of this brief work. I cannot imagine that “Point Omega” will be considered among the author’s best writing, but it is still well worth the small effort it requires to digest its ideas and images.
    • 4/5
      I'm big on endings. If a novel ties everything together at the end in a way that impresses me, I'm willing to forgive a whole lot of frustration over the course of the journey. Now, Point Omega, at 117 pages, only barely qualifies as a "journey," but I found the three sources of ideas in the book (they're technically characters, but the characterization is bare-bones) to be pretty boring. The aged intellectual Elster's speeches consist of a few interesting, if broadly sketched, notions accompanied by a whole lot of nonsensical academese. Finley sounds like he wishes he sounded more like Elster (he needn't worry, incidentally--he's well on his way), and the unnamed (or is he...?) central figure in the first and last chapters reminds me of a lot of people I took English classes with in college who thought their ideas were much more interesting than they really were.Sounds insufferable, doesn't it? I cringed my way through the first thirty pages or so, worried that DeLillo was unaware of how ridiculous these characters sometimes sound. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that they were meant to sound out of touch, for reasons that have to do with the plot, and one particular even serving to shake these characters into an awareness of the world that they've lost touch with in favor of all this insular language. Incidentally, if you're reading this review as a part of a survey of reviews to figure out what the consensus is, and whether it might be worth dropping money on this book...stop reading reviews. Some of them carelessly spoil a plot point that you'd probably rather not know about (the review below is guilty of this). The consensus is basically that the book's pretty good, particularly if you like DeLillo.So even though I sort of came to peace with the inanity of some of what goes through these characters' heads, I was still a little bit annoyed. The book was coming off too much like a summary of some stuff that Don DeLillo has been thinking about recently, sort of like some of the books Markson's been publishing in the last few years. However...the last section manages to tie the "Anonymity" sections in the MoMA that bookend the novel to the main narrative that takes place in the California desert in a really interesting, subtle way. And that's ultimately what won me over. Not immediately, though. I actually didn't see the link that the last section establishes until a couple hours after I finished the book, at which point I was at a Super Bowl party, and had a hard time explaining why I was suddenly staring at the floor, shaking my head and smiling. The great part about what DeLillo pulls off in that last section is that he doesn't just link the narratives--by extension he creates pretty interesting links among those interesting bits I was mentioning earlier. This is all pretty vague, I know, but this is one of a few literary books that I think really benefits from the element of surprise. So, in a somewhat ironic way, it's the plot that ended up redeeming all the concepts in this DeLillo novel. I came awfully close to not liking it, though, so I encourage anybody who reads Point Omega (and if you think you might want to...why not? It'll take you, what? Three, four hours?) to spend some time thinking about the thing as a whole when you finish.