As the two men float ever further from the moorings of the cities they left behind, the going gets a little tedious. He envisions a minimalist work in which Elster will speak in one continuous take while standing against a blank wall in Brooklyn.Īnyone recalling the Bush aide who anonymously boasted in 2004 that the Administration would “create our own reality” to reshape the post 9-11 world will easily detect echoes of that dreamy hubris in Elster's big declarations. Elster had been recruited to serve as a sort of conceptual guru, but he left in disillusionment after plans for the “haiku war” he preferred bogged down in numbers and nitty gritty.įinley hopes to coax Elster into sharing that experience while the camera rolls.

We join them at Elster's rustic desert hideaway in California, where Elster has retreated into the emptiness of time and space following his departure from the Bush-Cheney team of planners for the Iraq War. Strangelove without the accent or the comic props. Holding down the book's center is a pair of inward-looking men: Jim Finley, a middle-aged filmmaker who, in the words of his estranged wife, is too serious about art but not serious enough about life and the much older Richard Elster, a sort of Bush-era Dr. There is no room for false steps, and even the sure-footed will want to double back now and then to check for signs they might have missed along the way. Reading it is akin to a brisk hike up a desert mountain-a trifle arid, perhaps, but with occasional views of breathtaking grandeur. , DeLillo's lean prose is so spare and concentrated that the aftereffects are more powerful than usual.

This is both a charm and a curse of much of his fiction, a reason he is so exciting to some readers and so irritating to others (notably George Will). It's hardly a new experience to emerge from a Don DeLillo novel feeling faintly disturbed and disoriented.

Point omega