Don DeLillo and the Premature Demise of Good (read: Challenging) Prose

As I’m finishing Don DeLillo’s compact (116-page) new book, “Point Omega”, I’m reminded of an old interview he did in the 70s or 80s. In it, he says:

“Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market. The writer is driven by his conviction that some truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full of mystery, that it might be better for you, Dear Reader, if you went back to the Living section of your newspaper because this is the dying section and you don’t really want to be here. This writer is working against the age and so he feels some satisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an audience.”

To me, that really summed up nicely what DeLillo is (unconsciously?) doing with his fifteenth novel, one that I enjoyed massively, and one that won’t be a best-seller, one that’s already been dismissed by a bunch of critics, and one you probably won’t want to read. It’s slow-moving, frequently depressing, there’s only three characters, no real plot, nothing close to what could be considered a resolution at the end. Vaguely centered on the idea of Tipler’s omega point theory, “Point Omega” follows a young filmmaker into the desert where he attempts to film a documentary about a reclusive professor who happens to have worked deep within the Pentagon, advising military officials on the Iraq war. The filmmaker ends up chilling with the professor – Richard Elster – at his house. Eventually Elster’s daughter joins them, and besides one strange missing-person “event” that could be called the climax (Spoiler: Elster’s daughter disappears), that’s it. Nothing else really happens.

The narrative is framed nicely by an anonymous man at a MOMA exhibit that shows the movie Psycho slowed down so that the entire film takes twenty-four hours to run. Upon a closer read, one finds many subtleties between the exhibit and the main thread of the narrative, the three major characters, and the themes of time, death, and special relationships that are discussed – subtly – throughout “Point Omega”. DeLillo creates a world that is – you guessed it – full of mystery, difficult to tackle on several levels, oftentimes obscured by his unique genius. But the thing about DeLillo is that no matter what happens in his books, no matter if you “get” what he’s trying to say and do, no one – and I mean NO ONE – can craft a sentence the way he does. He’s always been criticized for being overstylized, but I think that his style is what separates him from everyone else, and always has; a style that functions almost like another character just waiting to be dissected. Burning and slashing your way through DeLillo’s prose is like eating a five-course Italian meal – it should be savored, consumed until each plate is clean, with the undeniable desire to suck up every last drop of dessert even though your stomach is overstuffed and ready to explode. DeLillo is like the asshole waiter who doesn’t even give enough of a shit about you to re-fill your water glass because he knows you’ll be back for more; you can’t help it. Below are some of my favorite nuggets from “Point Omega”:

"His face was long and florid, flesh drooping slightly at the sides of the jaw. He had a large pocked nose, eyes maybe grayish green, brows flaring. The braided hair should have seemed incongruous but didn't. It wasn't styled in sections but only woven into broad strands a tthe back of the head and it gave him a kind of cultural identity, a flair of distinction, the intellectual as tribal elder."

"It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature is meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story."

“I began to understand what Elster meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies.”

With so much of contemporary literature feeling too oversimplified and refined, paragraphs like those give me a reason to get up in the morning and keep me from killing myself when I pass the endless brightly colored rows of James Patterson and Dean Koontz at Barnes & Nobel.

Not to say that there haven’t always been cheap dime-store novels, used exclusively for low-thought entertainment purposes, throw-away pleasures. But it seems to me that back in the day, the biggest best-sellers were usually always literary fiction, books that challenged readers as well as entertained them. Before the mind-numbing, instant-satisfaction era of TV and the Internet, people used to actually enjoy having to mentally work their way through a dense sea of prose in search of the sublime. Having the revelations handed out on a platter just wasn’t as much fun, apparently. It’s refreshing in this literary age – where “writing” insipidly about vampires or wizards is basically the only way to sell a million copies – to see that there are still real writers like DeLillo still putting out challenging, powerful books and not giving a fuck if anyone reads them. In DeLillo’s case, it does help that he probably hasn’t had to worry about money since writing “White Noise” twenty-five years ago. “Underworld” probably helped a little, too, in the get-paid department.

On second thought, maybe I’ll write a story about swamp monsters in England that use magic wands to suck blood out of unsuspecting Japanese tourists, before I get all serious and anti-commercial.