Culture

Prospect Recommends: Point Omega

March 05, 2010
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Point Omega by Don DeLillo (Picador, £14.99) Don DeLillo’s short, very odd but oddly brilliant new novel is set in just two locations. One is a room in a New York gallery where an unnamed man obsessively watches a video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, consisting of repeat screenings of Hitchcock’s film slowed down so that it takes a whole day to run. The other is a house in the desert, to which neocon intellectual Richard Elster has repaired, pursued by a young filmmaker, Jim Finley, who wants him to talk to camera about his experiences advising the Pentagon in the run-up to Iraq.

Little happens in either storyline—or little that would conventionally be called “action”—but that of course is DeLillo’s point: this is a novel about the “slowing of motion,” and the kind of watching and thinking that become possible when the usual time constraints cease to apply. DeLillo’s prose rises to the challenge: both the snail-paced footage and the desert scenery are mesmerisingly described. Does the novel offer any profound insights into American foreign policy? Probably not, other than functioning as a kind of anti-argument, a wholesale rebuttal of the “overarching ideas and principles” that Elster, in his role as “conceptualiser” of war, was required to supply.

This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect