I was just given a copy of Point Omega by Don Delillo. Mister Delillo is, I’m afraid, another author I just haven’t had a chance to read. His Underworld has always been on my list of things to read, and I am deeply ashamed to have missed it so far. Point Omega is an interesting novella. It’s hard to describe why, but I will try.

Point Omega was, for me, a gruelling read. I think it’s because I’ve recently been reading faster paced novels with intense characters, so I wasn’t really expecting something which is a very quiet novel to read. Its characters are pretty much devoid of emotion in that they hardly seem to display it overtly. Everything is covert – possibly a reflection on the topic. The characters are almost hidden deep inside themselves and don’t let anything out. Their interaction is cold, subtle, and sombre. It’s almost dreamlike the way they pause and scrape their conversations together.

Plotwise, it’s overly simple – a man with dreams of making his own film (he’s a little too obsessed with very artistic forms of the media and his tastes run to the bland spectrum), proposes his new idea to his subject – a man who has worked in the inner-sanctum of the war office and who, possibly, knows every detail of the government’s conflicts and wars. He’s a man in the know, and our moviemaker wants to film this man standing in front a wall, just telling his story unedited and somehow this will be more truthful and more interesting. I can’t see it, but that’s pretty much the essence of our moviemaker. To further outline his proposal, the moviemaker visits the subject at his lonely cabin in the middle of nowhere. He spends days, which turn into weeks, just kind of mooching. He listens to the subject’s many talks, in a kind of silent interview. He tries hard to convince the subject that this is a great idea he has.

Their ambiguous relationship is rippled with the arrival of the subject’s daughter, to whom our moviemaker is subtly (oh so subtly) attracted to. Something happens, and the relationship between the moviemaker and the subject is again altered. The ending is somewhat ambiguous, but then my mind isn’t fully attuned to these artistic things. Either I didn’t “get it” or i “got it” and wasn’t quite convinced. Either the ending was evidence of a schitzo, or something a little more surreal. Either way is okay, really, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. Perhaps the overall tone of the novel was a little too frozen.

The strange thing was, I was so overwhelmed by the excessive coldness of the novel that I was somewhat taken aback when, at one stage, a glimmer of almost emotion appeared out of nowhere. The first time (rare these times were), was when the moviemaker, compelled by a (possibly) slight tendency toward voyeurism, peeks into her bedroom (while she’s absent from it) and whilst he does a little pale description which describes the girl as sylphlike with her element in the air and showing how the girl moved as though nothing about this place was different from any other, it was the final line in this small fragment which read, I opened the bedroom door and looked several times but did not enter, which actually gave the moviemaker’s character a little more, well, character.

The use of the movie Psycho, conjured as an artistic display in a gallery, played in ultra-slow motion, was intriguing, and hopefully did what I think it was trying to do, thus making the end (ambiguous though it was) a little more interesting than it would have been without it. I liked the end sequence. I did. I just don’t know if I understood exactly what Delillo was trying to do with Point Omega. And, as I’m a complete hack, I’m not surprised if my intellecty powers weren’t up to the task.

It was odd, because usually I love novels like this – off-centre and a bit on the dark side. I love a good bit of weird and seediness. I love hints of psychotic killers or weird homicidal mental problems or whatever lunatic ideas lay in the undercurrents of human thought, but I just couldn’t grasp the characters. They were too 2-dimensional to me. Too movielike. Perhaps that’s what Delillo was trying to achieve.

Without doubt this is a disturbing and interesting novel. It’s got its hook, and it’s not as bland as you might think I’m saying it is. It’s just a little too empty a room for me. It had the ability to turn into something powerful, but kind of gave up in the same way that Haruki Murakami did with After Dark. It’s just slightly too literary for me.

It won’t stop me reading Underworld, though. I really should give that a go…