Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is a quiet jewel of a book, a short novel that is really two short stories (the beginning and end of one bookending the second story in the middle) that read like a play. Nothing much happens in Point Omega: the premise of the novel is conversation, our attempts to communicate with the intention of moving another person — the kind of suasion that enrolls a collaborator in an arty film project or another yet disappear into the desert.
As if by touched by fate or brushing up against coincidence, the novel’s bookends (the outer story) communicates only barely with the story in the middle. The inside story is woven by three characters who spend their time talking.
The younger man wants to make a film featuring Richard Elster, the older man, who was an advisor to warmongers. The younger man wants to get him up against a wall and hear what that was like. Ester tells him that they wanted “an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint.” Someone who could bring new insight to the stumbling war on that adjective, terror, to “the blat and stammer of Iraq.” Someone who could deepen and make rigorous the banality of evil. Read the rest of this entry »
in the studio for 48 hours. Merritt wrote a cool song called “Man of a Million Faces.”
