By Dean Poling
Don DeLillo may have painted himself in a literary corner several years ago. In the opening of his massive novel, “Underworld,” he spends many pages writing about a 1950s baseball game with colorful characters in the stands including Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover. This opening bit of prose was so powerful, the rest of “Underworld” — by all means, a bold, penetrating and big, important book — could not match, let alone surpass, it. This opening was so well done that publishers later released these pages as a book unto itself without the bother of the hundreds of subsequent “Underworld” pages they had been intended to introduce. DeLillo will be remembered for his earlier novel, “White Noise,” but it is “Underworld’s” opening which has readers still talking, and coming back to see what’s next from DeLillo’s pen. So far, none of his subsequent novels have come close to matching the integrated scope of grandeur and minutiae captured in “Underworld’s” opening. Not his 9/11 novel “Falling Man,” nor his latest novel, “Point Omega.” The new DeLillo is a strange, little book, probably shorter in its entirety than the opening segment of “Underworld.” It lacks humor which, sadly, has become a DeLillo trademark in the past few outings. “Point Omega” follows a documentarian filming an aged, intellectual architect of war. They converse about the meaning of this and that, and seem perfectly content in their fairly unhappy, intellectual explorations until the old man’s daughter arrives. She changes the dynamic of the relationships. Her arrival shakes the project to the core. Bookending this narrative are two scenes of a man viewing “24 Hour Psycho,” a slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock’s notorious thriller that takes a full day to screen. “Point Omega” is a subtle study of society and death, a volume where there are no straight answers, no convenient conclusions. Like life, this novel leaves numerous loose ends in its passing. “Point Omega” has fertile ground for reflection — one should expect nothing less from DeLillo. However, many readers may expect at least some grace note of humor, some more obvious resolution. Some will read “Point Omega” and simply ask, what’s the point?
