Point Omega

Don DeLillo

04 March 2011
9780330512398
160 pages

Synopsis

Written in hypnotic prose, Don DeLillo's Point Omega is both a metaphysical meditation and a deeply unsettling mystery, from which one thing emerges: loss, fierce and incomprehensible.

Richard Elster, a retired secret war adviser, has retreated to a forlorn house in a desert, 'somewhere south of nowhere'. But his planned isolation is interrupted when he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience in a one-take film. The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question.

Reading the fiction of Don DeLillo is an utterly original experience: powerful, prescient, perceptive. Writing in a prose that is both majestic and muscular, his unerringly accurate vision penetrates deep into the soul of America and consistently leaves readers with a fresh perspective on the world. Since the publication of his first novel, in 1971, he has been acknowledged across the world as one of the greatest writers of his generation.

Point Omega is a treat: the most satisfying and least cryptic of DeLillo's late novels.
Another formidable construction by a very distinctive writer.
A pared, intense anti-parable . . . so rigorous and so precise.