Point Omega by Don DeLillo

We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down the local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.

Spoilers.

I realized while thinking about this review that I’ve read more DeLillo books than any other author since the Fifty Books Project started. It seems strange now that I disliked DeLillo’s abstracted, distant prose and stylized dialog, but there it is. Now, I consider him one of my favorite authors even though I’ve disliked about as many of his books as I’ve liked. DeLillo, at the best of times, is only marginally interested in plot. Libra is the only book of his I’ve read that’s even slightly plot-driven, and even his characters, as enigmatic and interesting as they can be, generally aren’t the driving force in his books. Instead, it seems to me, liking or disliking DeLillo as an author comes down to appreciating his primary themes—the disconnection of the modern man and the difficulty or impossibility of reconnecting, the absurdity of everyday life, the vapidity of consumerism, etc—and his prose. DeLillo is, hands down, one the best stylists I’ve ever read and it’s that quality that makes even his mediocre novels, like The Body Artist, interesting to me.

Point Omega, his most recent book, certainly falls closer to The Body Artist than Libra. It reads almost like two novellas, one nested inside the other, with no clear connection between the two. In the first, titled Anonymity, an unidentified man stands in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and watches a display called 24 Hour Psycho. This exhibit, which actually exists in real life, consists of a projection screen, viewable from both sides, playing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, slowed down so it plays through once every 24 hours. The man visits the exhibit every day and marvels at how changing the presentation changes the entire feel of the film, making each moment as banal as the last. In the second, postmodern documentarian Jim Finley travels to the middle of the California desert to film ex-Iraq War consultant Richard Elster. Things are uneventful until Elster’s daughter Jessica shows up, sent by her mother in an attempt to end her relationship with the mysterious Dennis. Circumstances change, however, when Jessica disappears, leaving behind all her possessions and sapping both Jim’s will to make the film and Elster’s will to live. The books ends by completing the story in the first section, such as it is: the unnamed man meets a mysterious woman, they discuss the film, and then leave. The only connection between the two stories is the exhibit itself—while trying to convince him to participate in his film, Jim takes Elster to see 24 Hour Psycho.

Man, this book was abstract. Jessica’s disappearance is the closest thing to a plot development in the entire novel, and even it occurs only during the last 20 pages of the second section and is barely explained at all. We (and Jim and Elster) never discover what happened. Possibilities are thrown out—lost in the woods, suicide, elopement with Dennis—but no evidence is given to weight one over the other. Much like The Body Artist, virtually all conclusions that can be drawn are equally valid, not that DeLillo had ever been particularly didactic. The themes are right there in the title and the excerpt above: the omega point is a term that describes the maximum level of complexity toward wich the universe seems to be evolving, but DeLillo seems to say that focusing on the advancement toward complexity isn’t as significant as the little moments—hence the fascination with Psycho when it’s broken down into its simplest bits, and the de-emphasis on creating the documentary once Jessica disappears. These ideas are hardly seamless, but on the whole, it makes sense to me. At a little over 100 pages, Point Omega is never particularly dull, thanks to DeLillo’s language, but it’s as stripped down as DeLillo gets, and sometimes feels a little unnecessary. At his best, DeLillo revels in complexity. I'd like to see him heading back in that direction.

The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

Ah, 100-page books. While Brent is slaving away at Don Quixote and War and Peace, I'm pulling away from the crowd by reading books like The Island of Dr. Moreau. And yes, it is a legitimate book, not a comic book, Nathan, and not a short story, Alyson.

The plot of this book is likely known to you, either from the awful Marlon Brando/Val Kilmer flick or the countless parodies on The Simpsons and what-have-you. An intellectual named Edward Prendick is shipwrecked and ends up on a ship bound for the Island of Dr. Moreau, where he is kicked off with the Doctor's assistant Montgomery. Prendick remembers Moreau from a high-profile scandal in which Moreau was kicked out of London for mutilating cats in his experiments, and learns he has come to the island to continue with his work: creating people from animals. (Not, as some parodies might have you believe, combining humans and animals.)

This book, written in 1896, is one of the earliest examples of science fiction. As all great science fiction, the book's value lies not in the science but the social commentary. With the island's Beast People, who have been indoctrinated by Moreau with "the Law"--Don't walk on all fours, don't eat meat, don't scratch or claw, be human--Wells seems to suggest that we are captives of our own inner natures, as the Beast People cannot help but revert back to their feral ways. Moreau's attempt to "play God" fails utterly, perhaps undermining our concept of control over our own bodies and minds.

But it also displays what it one of science fiction's biggest faults, which is that the science dates it extremely. Moreau's methods have nothing to do with "genes" or "DNA," but "vivisection"--a word which seems almost arcane to us in light of modern science fiction, in which Dr. McCoy can fix your broken arm by waving a blinking box over your skin. Moreau teaches his beasts to talk and think, but never once uses the word "conditioning," an idea for which Pavlov didn't win the Nobel Prize until 1904. No modern reader would be fooled into thinking that Moreau could create a human being this way, though many at the turn of the century might, and that's a shame--for all its potential and even though much of it deals with worlds that don't yet exist, it tends to become dated much quicker than other literature.