by Kelly Pickerill
Point Omega by Don DeLillo. I talked to Nan about it on Saturday, and she said that along with Coetzee’s new one, Summertime, she considers Point Omega to be one of the most important novels she’s read in some time.
Excerpted from the New York Times Book Review article, “A Wrinkle in Time,” by Geoff Dyer:
The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon’s film project “24 Hour Psycho ” (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by. DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of “the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets,” “Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her.” Of course, DeLillo being DeLillo, it’s the deeper implications of the piece — what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time — that detain him. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the “radically altered plane of time”: “The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw.”
Illustration by John Ritter; photograph from Paramount Pictures
Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim. He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and — such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction — become a hostage to the habit of “gyrate exaggerations” (the phrase is in “The Body Artist”) and the signature patterns of “demolished logic.” “Point Omega” starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It’s barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it’s the latest increment and echo: a “last flare” that — we’ve been here before, too — may not be the last after all.
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