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A slender sandwich of meaty fiction
By Geoff Dyer |
February 21, 2010, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
DON DeLillo seemed to have reached some kind of omega zone almost 20 years ago. After the red-hot streak of "The Names," "White Noise" and "Libra," his 10th novel, "Mao II," was so self-derivative that one wondered how much he had left in the tank.
The answer came in the form of "Underworld," an epic rejoinder that left the reader doubly pummeled. DeLillo's next novel, "The Body Artist," felt like a warm-down, but it was followed, disastrously, by the high-concept self-karaoke of "Cosmopolis."
So admirers will approach his new novel, "Point Omega," with as much anxiety as excitement.
The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon's film project "24 Hour Psycho" (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by.
DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of "the actor's eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets," "Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her."
Of course, it's the deeper implications of the piece -- what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time -- that detain DeLillo. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the "radically altered plane of time:" "The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw."
This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix "conceptual." As soon as it's put like that, however, doubts creep in.
How does this persuasive interrogation of the visible benefit from not being an essay, from being novelized? What is gained by the choreography of post-noirish suspense?
The answer is provided by the stuff in the book's middle, the meat in a slender fictive sandwich. Scholar Elster worked with the Pentagon on "risk assessments" and provided theoretical guidance in readiness for the invasion of Iraq. A young guy, Jim Finley, another familiar DeLillo type, is trying to persuade Elster to take part in a film he wants to make.
Eventually they end up in the Sonoran Desert in a house together, sitting on the deck mainly, drinking and shooting that unmistakable DeLillo breeze. They're joined by Elster's daughter, Jessie, and for a little while it's almost idyllic -- "vast night, moon in transit" -- in a zero-humidity sort of way. There's even a hint, a "random agitation in the air," of erotic possibility.
Then something happens or doesn't happen to Jessie, and she disappears. The men search for her; the desert presses in on them, a desolate end zone of ancient time.
DeLillo's title is derived from the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Elster mentions him a couple of times, sketches his idea about the way "consciousness accumulates ... begins to reflect upon itself," until, eventually, it reaches the omega point. Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim.
He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and -- such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction -- becomes a hostage to the habit of "gyrate exaggerations" and the signature patterns of "demolished logic."
"Point Omega" starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It's barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it's the latest increment and echo: a "last flare" that -- we've been here before, too -- may not be the last after all.
The answer came in the form of "Underworld," an epic rejoinder that left the reader doubly pummeled. DeLillo's next novel, "The Body Artist," felt like a warm-down, but it was followed, disastrously, by the high-concept self-karaoke of "Cosmopolis."
So admirers will approach his new novel, "Point Omega," with as much anxiety as excitement.
The book begins and ends with Douglas Gordon's film project "24 Hour Psycho" (installed at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 2006), in which the 109-minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to twitch by.
DeLillo conveys with haunting lucidity the uncanny beauty of "the actor's eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets," "Janet Leigh in the detailed process of not knowing what is about to happen to her."
Of course, it's the deeper implications of the piece -- what it reveals about the nature of film, perception and time -- that detain DeLillo. As an unidentified spectator, DeLillo is mesmerized by the "radically altered plane of time:" "The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw."
This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix "conceptual." As soon as it's put like that, however, doubts creep in.
How does this persuasive interrogation of the visible benefit from not being an essay, from being novelized? What is gained by the choreography of post-noirish suspense?
The answer is provided by the stuff in the book's middle, the meat in a slender fictive sandwich. Scholar Elster worked with the Pentagon on "risk assessments" and provided theoretical guidance in readiness for the invasion of Iraq. A young guy, Jim Finley, another familiar DeLillo type, is trying to persuade Elster to take part in a film he wants to make.
Eventually they end up in the Sonoran Desert in a house together, sitting on the deck mainly, drinking and shooting that unmistakable DeLillo breeze. They're joined by Elster's daughter, Jessie, and for a little while it's almost idyllic -- "vast night, moon in transit" -- in a zero-humidity sort of way. There's even a hint, a "random agitation in the air," of erotic possibility.
Then something happens or doesn't happen to Jessie, and she disappears. The men search for her; the desert presses in on them, a desolate end zone of ancient time.
DeLillo's title is derived from the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Elster mentions him a couple of times, sketches his idea about the way "consciousness accumulates ... begins to reflect upon itself," until, eventually, it reaches the omega point. Within the more circumscribed realm of literature, this is where DeLillo has staked his mighty claim.
He has reconfigured things, or our perception of them, to such an extent that DeLillo is now implied in the things themselves. While photographers and filmmakers routinely remake the world in their images of it, this is something only a few novelists (Hemingway was one) ever manage. Like Hemingway, DeLillo has imprinted his syntax on reality and -- such is the blow-back reward of the Omega Point Scheme for Stylistic Distinction -- becomes a hostage to the habit of "gyrate exaggerations" and the signature patterns of "demolished logic."
"Point Omega" starts out by contemplating a reprojection of a famous film. It's barely had time to get going before it ends up reflecting on the oeuvre of which it's the latest increment and echo: a "last flare" that -- we've been here before, too -- may not be the last after all.
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