Point Omega: A Novel

Don DeLillo

Apr 2010 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

A brief, unnerving, and exceptionally hard-hitting novel about time and loss as only the bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld can tell it.

In this potent and beautiful novel, the writer The New York Times calls “prophetic about twenty-first-century America” looks into the mind and heart of a scholar who was recruited to help the military conceptualize the war.

We see Richard Elster at the end of his service. He has retreated to the desert, in search of space and geologic time. There he is joined by a filmmaker and by Elster’s daughter Jessica—an “otherworldly” woman from New York. The three of them build an odd, tender intimacy, something like a family. Then a devastating event turns detachment into colossal grief, and it is a human mystery that haunts the landscape of desert and mind.

Ratings and reviews

I gotta admit - I did not understand this book.To see if I had grasped any of what he wrote I read a series of reviews that finely dissected the novel/novella into its intricately layered strata, providing a variety of interpretations that evidently went way over my head. So, suffice to say, if you want to read an off-kilter little book that sometimes has a plot & sometimes does not, yet still manages to make you turn the pages, then read DeLillo's latest.If nothing else his prose is sparse like his characters & he creates great mood. Sorry.

This short novel contains more substance than novels four times its length. Not a single word wanting.

About the author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, which was made into a Netflix film, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man, and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.