Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

An excoriating portrayal of loss and an unnerving post-Iraq discourse mark this brilliant novel of modern America
‘Point Omega is a treat: the most satisfying and least cryptic of DeLillo’s late novels’ Sunday Telegraph
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.

(From Publisher).

Don DeLillo, the author of fifteen novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written three plays.
 

Point Omega is a zen-like state of consciousness, which Elster, an old philosopher who lives in the desert wants to achieve. The novel concentrates on the contradiction between the quiet life in the desert and the busy life in the city.

Original idea, interesting structure, polished style. Enigmatic book with very strong characters.