DeLillo’s major novels - “White Noise,” “Libra,” “Underworld” among them - feature vivid narratives and characters that are partly ideas: public ideas, and for the most part, excoriating. In “Point Omega” the characters are translucent wraiths, and the story a bare sketch; it is the ideas that are the actors. The closest resemblance may be to Albert Camus’ philosophical monologues in such novels as “The Fall.”
The ideas in “Point Omega” have to do with the leaching of material human reality by the manipulated abstractions of modern life. They radiate, sometimes obscurely, from the book’s burning and not in the least obscure core: the scathing recollections and reflections of 73-year-old Richard Elster after his time as a pet Pentagon intellectual.
These are elicited by Jim Finley, intent on making a film that shows, using the trendiest of pared-down techniques, nothing but Elster talking into the camera. No questions, no charts, no camera angles: just the man himself and, as the only inflection, a blank gray wall behind him. Finley expects to stay two or three days at Elster’s decrepit cabin in the Arizona desert. Instead, sucked into the vortex of Elster’s desolate musings and the related desolation of the sun-blasted desert, he ends up staying for weeks.
In Elster’s account of his Pentagon work, DeLillo has fashioned a miniature war novel: instead of shooters, thinkers; instead of death-dealing battle, death-dealing ideas. In this section the writing stands with his sharpest and most terrible.
“Their war is abstract. They think they’re sending an army into a place on a map,” Elster recalls of the military planners. The so-called defense intellectuals do worse (he shuns comparison with Paul Wolfowitz, thus making the comparison evident). “There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create.’’
