Point Omega by Don DeLillo

117 pages
Published by Scribner
$24.00

Don DeLillo is melting into himself while some other author slowly emerges from the melty DeLillo puddle. He is delirious with his own talent. He seems to be caught in a metaphysical fever dream in which he imagines himself to be a scribe of thin, existential novel-like things. So there's been The Body Artist. And Cosmopolis. And Falling Man. And Point Omega. Now, where the hell can he go from here? This is where it gets interesting: what will the next DeLillo book look like? Because I'm not sure he can keep dragging us along on this weird trip.

Quotes:

"In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. But it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw...To see what's here, finally to look and to know you're looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion." pg.5

"It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing." pg.13

"I'll tell you this much. War creates a closed world and not only for those in combat but for the plotters, the strategists. Except their war is acronyms, projections, contingencies, methodologies." pg.28

"Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field." pg.53

"I know about your marriage. You had the kind of marriage where you tell each other everything. You told her everything. I look at you and see this in your face. It's the worst thing you can do in a marriage. Tell her everything you feel, tell her everything you do. That's why she thinks you're crazy. You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself." pg.66

Reviewed by Schuyler