Omega man

POINT OMEGA

By Don DeLillo

Scribner,117 pages

Available at National Book store

Framed around “24 Hour Psycho,” an actual art installation by Douglas Gordon that was shown in New York’s MoMA in 2006,   Don De-Lillo’s 15th novel is a meditation on human consciousness. A short meditation, actually — all of 117 pages — but though Point Omega is novella-thin it’s by no means light reading. We enter the story in the darkness of MoMA, where the artist has decelerated the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic to two frames per second, projected onto a large translucent screen sans soundtrack. Regular film hits our eyeballs at 24 frames per second, so the snail-paced result is an immersive experience; those with the patience to watch super-slo-mo sequences of Psycho, such as the nameless observer in the two framing chapters of the book, find it transformative.

What’s the point of slowing down Psycho? Didn’t director Gus Van Sant try (and fail) to deconstruct that goth horror classic with his play-by-play remake? The point, according to Gordon, is to defamiliarize the familiar, to introduce “recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light” into a movie that has been absorbed by audiences and analyzed by film students for its quick editing and suspense for half a century. Here, in Gordon’s 1993 installation, the film’s iconic imagery and story gets slowed down to continuous viewing.

Kind of like Warhol training his camera on the Empire State Building or someone sleeping for a full day at a time, decades earlier. But here it’s cultural artifact, impregnated with meaning, made into something completely different. The people who watch “24 Hour Psycho” for large stretches might feel they’re caught up in the rhythms of Hitchcock, or the delayed gratification of the narrative, or the workings of a new consciousness.

At least this was what attracted DeLillo, apparently, to include the art installation in Point Omega. The central story concerns Richard Elster, a “defense intellectual” and scholar who was enlisted by the Bush Pentagon to assist in strategizing the Iraq War back in the mid-2000s. He has retreated into the New Mexico deserts in disgust, tracked by a New York City filmmaker who wants Elster to make peace with himself on camera (shades of former defense secretary Robert S. MacNamara’s exposition in Errol Morris’s The Fog of War) for a new documentary he’s planning. Elster’s daughter also shows up, a young girl retreating from her mom and a troubled relationship. The three become a sort of nuclear family out in the desert, observing the sunset, deconstructing its meaning, slowing everything down to the Omega Point.

What is the Omega Point? Everything in DeLillo crystallizes in an image that is often difficult to pin down in words. Here’s Elster’s version:

He paused and drank and paused again.

“What are we?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Telihard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”

Sure. Easy to say when you’re out in the desert, contemplating the infinite. Wikipedia puts it this way: “French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (used the term omega point) to describe a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.” After that, we apparently transcend — but to what is unclear.

Of course, DeLillo is a master at obscuring his own meaning. Whether it’s a thousand-page novel revolving around a baseball (Underworld) or the clouds of unexplained lethal gas in White Noise, obscurity is DeLillo’s calling card. He knows there are mysteries in life, and he uses language like an Old Master uses chiaroscuro: to hint at meaning through delicate shading.

Only trouble is, DeLillo might have said all that needed to be said with previous books. He’s turned to thinner and thinner statements, telegraphic bursts of language, sketches as opposed to masterworks. Gone, it seems, are the doorstop days of Underworld or Libra. Everything the author had to say about the 20th century was probably packed into those hefty tomes. So what’s left?

With Point Omega, DeLillo continues to take the pulse of American life, after 9/11 (Underworld came out in 1997; Falling Man, his previous novel, also relatively thin, came out in 2007). Here, he focuses his story on an image — the man alone, trying to disappear into the 24-hour unfolding of Psycho (“How long would he have to stand there, how many weeks or months, before the film’s time scheme absorbed his own?”), trying to sever all connections, or make new ones.

DeLillo contrasts this with Elster’s fate. One in a long line of guru characters, Elster is more filmy, more opaque than most of DeLillo’s gurus. He doesn’t have a problem with war itself (“I wanted a haiku war,” he said. “I wanted a war in three lines”), just with the way systems and decisions overtake the clarity of military thinking (“War creates a closed world”). In short, George Bush’s dilemma for eight long years.

DeLillo seems hypnotized by history, mesmerized by the mystery of film. He often focuses on a key cinematic moment, its historic repercussions, as with the Zapruder film endlessly looping in Underworld, or the unreleased Rolling Stones’ documentary called C*******r Blues that is analyzed to bits in that same novel. Watching is what DeLillo does best, apparently:

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. He said this more than once, Elster did, in more than one way. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner.

An eight-hundred-page biography is nothing more than dead conjecture, he said.

Point Omega is a haiku novel, nowhere near perfect, because maybe DeLillo realizes perfection is beside the point. It whispers like the wind, not like a talk radio host gone haywire. It’s not a novel of ideas, but rather an idea of a novel.