Point Omega: A Novel Summary and Reviews

Point Omega: A Novel
by Don DeLillo

Point Omega: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Don DeLillo
Brand: Simon & Schuster Audio
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2010-02-02
ISBN: 1439169950
Number of pages: 117
Publisher: Scribner

Book Reviews of Point Omega: A Novel

Book Review: A Strange Mystery Platformed on PSYCHO
Summary: 4 Stars

Wikipedia declares that omega is "the last, the end, or the ultimate limit of a set." In POINT OMEGA, DeLillo explores where this point exists in humankind. It may be "a sublime transformation of mind and soul..." Or, it may be the point when consciousness is exhausted and the mind falls back and "we want to be stones in the field."

To investigate this question, DeLillo begins this novella with "24 Hour Psycho", a video work by Douglas Gordon that played at MoMA and that slows the pace of Hitchcock's masterpiece to 24 hours. As this plays, a mysterious and obsessive man spends days viewing the work, where... "He was mesmerized by... the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion... the depth of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing." At this pace, the film engages "the individual at a depth beyond the usual assumptions."

Meanwhile, Richard Elster, an intellectual in the Defense establishment, has gone to his house in the southwestern desert to escape what he experiences as the deadening cycle of: "News and Traffic. Sports and Weather." Within the Defense establishment, Elster is a person who develops concepts, such as rendition, which "find mystery and romance in ...a word that was designed to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced."

To these men, who pursue the reshaping of normal reality, DeLillo adds Jim Finley, a film maker, and Jesse, Elster's daughter, whose conversation is "just talk, self-contained, unreferring ... a dim idyll in the summer flatlands." Then, Jesse, who is fleeing a strange man in New York, disappears. And DeLillo shows Elster and Finley as they journey toward their point omega.

POINT OMEGA has an elusive end, which may, or may not, tie everything together. As a blurb on the book observes, DeLillo is... "a writer of high intellect and harsh originality, equipped with extraordinary gifts of eye and ear." Recommended.

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