Point Omega

Point Omega
By Don DeLillo
Picador £14.99, 128 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

The deaths of John Updike last year and JD Salinger this year have left the impression that a great epoch of American fiction is drawing to a close, paralleling the new period of economic and political decline that the nation is facing. How will US novelists respond to the shrinking of US power? Don DeLillo, at 73 one of the old guard now, offers a pointer in his powerful novella Point Omega.

No other contemporary American novelist writes as acutely as DeLillo about power and its corollary, violence. His 1977 novel The Players presciently declared terrorism a defining feature of modern life. Libra in 1988 was about JFK’s assassination. His 1997 masterpiece Underworld tackled the cold war. Power is his subject, just as the Jewish-American experience is Philip Roth’s and paranoia is Thomas Pynchon’s.

There is a fashionable but misguided view that DeLillo has gone off the boil since the gargantuan Underworld. His books have certainly shrunk, and even his fiercest admirers would admit that 2003’s Cosmopolis was not a success.

Yet his last novel, 2007’s superb but underrated The Falling Man, showed no evidence of failing powers as he turned his attention to 9/11, the supreme episode of recent US history.

Point Omega reverts to the novella length of Cosmopolis but is appreciably better. Set in 2006, it opens with a man skulking in the shadows in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, watching a video installation in which the film Psy cho is slowed down to last 24 hours.

The video installation is a real one – “24 Hour Psycho” by the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon – and DeLillo vividly evokes the weird effect of seeing Hitchcock’s voyeuristic slasher in elongated time, as when the shadowy man watches Anthony Perkins’s eyes “in slow transit across his bony sockets”.

The action then cuts to the main body of the novella. This is narrated by a New York filmmaker who has travelled to an isolated house in the Californian desert in the hope of persuading its occupant, a 73-year-old academic who was involved in the Iraq war, to appear in a documentary.

As they spend long listless days together in the heat drinking and talking, the purpose of the filmmaker’s mission grows increasingly remote. The arrival of the academic’s withdrawn, possibly autistic, adult daughter, mysteriously sent away from New York by her mother, adds a further layer of distraction, until a shocking event jolts the characters out of their trance-like state.

The plot is intricately structured but DeLillo tells the story in a fairly straightforward, austere manner, with fewer verb-free sentences and nervily disconnected lines of dialogue than usual. At heart, this is a sparse little thriller, though the ideas scored into it are characteristically intense.

Richard Elster, the academic, was hired by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war as an in-house intellectual. He is a Paul Wolfowitz-style figure, apt to say things such as, “We tried to create new realities overnight”, in an echo of the real-life neoconservative anonymously quoted in the New York Times in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Elster denies that his post-invasion retreat to the desert is a form of exile: “Wolfowitz went to the World Bank,” he says. “That was exile.” The harbourer of a Dr Strangelovian death drive, he seems untroubled by the failure of the Iraq project, which – in his view – merely confirms mankind’s march to extinction. “We want to be the dead matter we used to be. We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.”

He rejoices in the slow passage of time in the desert. Whereas cities “were built to measure time, to remove time from nature”, the desert, like the slow-motion Psycho installation, reveals the inexorable truth of time. It moves us towards our ends, the omega point of the novella’s title, and then rolls on, brutally indifferent, unreadable.

The focus on end times is partly about ageing: Elster is the same age as DeLillo. But it also relates to the novella’s take on the Iraq war, which is portrayed opaquely, although unmistakeably, as the high water mark of America the hyper-power, after which comes the ebbing away. Elster’s nihilism – “When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror” – echoes the last words of an earlier fictional imperialist fallen on hard times, Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!”

Point Omega is not without some flaws. The characterisation is cursory, and there is a clumsy lurch into the gothic mode when DeLillo links the Psycho and desert scenes. But the high concepts about politics and art are seeded into the story sinuously, and the painterly rendering of the desert setting, with its “blinding tides of light and sky”, imparts a wonderfully eerie atmosphere. The tone registers American relative decline, but DeLillo’s powers show no sign of fading.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop music critic