Point Omega

I picked up four books on our first excursion to the Fanueil Library: The Daughters of Cain, by Colin Dexter, How Fiction Works, by James Wood, The Suicide Run, by William Styron, and Point Omega, by Don DeLillo. The last two I plucked from the New Additions bookshelf. Styron hasn't been writing for a few years, sadly, but his short stories are being collected and periodically (re)issued; The Suicide Run is folio of five Marine Corps stories. I enjoyed Styron's slender martial story-novella The Long March, and I expect these stories to be good.

Point Omega is a Deep Book about a Deep Subject laden with Deep Meaning. Like many a Deep Book, its setting is lonesome and isolated, its descriptions spare, its dialogue terse, its characters unburdened by personality. Blankness equals deepness, not to be confused with depth, which is really a shallow novelistic affectation. A ghostly mental chosisme is the ideal. Let the reader fill in the blanks.

Don Delillo is a very good writer, but I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about his novels. White Noise was a delight to read, and very cleverly done, but was its point even memorable? Underworld was superbly written, page by page, sweeping and endlessly layered, like its grand subject, a book to be read twice (though I've only managed one pass through), but was it enjoyable to read? Point Omega may pose an important metaphysical conundrum, one that deserves pondering or even savoring. I don't know. In style and subject, it seems to be a book that might have, nay, should have been written by Paul Auster. It probably would have been more interesting, and definitely would have been more fun.