Review
I opened this book with some trepidation. I have been an ardent fan of Don DeLillo since college when
White Noise first showed me what literature could make of our media-saturated age.
Underworld felt like an enormous gift and I never wanted its 827 pages to end. But then something happened, and DeLillo's novels got a lot shorter and a lot less satisfying.
The Body Artist was puzzling and vaguely mortifying.
Cosmopolis was downright awful. I couldn't bring myself to read
Falling Man.
So I'm glad to report that
Point Omega is a pleasure, if a fleeting one. Truth be told, at 117 pages, it feels a little long. This is an aerated novel that wants to be a condensed, stylized short story, or maybe even a play. There is no real action in the book. In fact, its one dramatic event is a heavily outlined non-event....
Beyond the Book
The Omega Point
What does Don DeLillo share with Marilyn Manson and Dilbert?
Answer: An interest in the omega point, a theory developed by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book The Phenomenon of Man, which was written in 1938 but was so contested by the Catholic church that it wasn't published until just after his death in 1955.
Teilhard was both a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist, so right there you can begin to sense the tensions within his work. He applied the theory of evolution to a larger understanding of the forward momentum, the perfectability of the cosmos, and The Phenomenon of Man sought to account for the central role of human consciousness in the accomplishment of spiritual...
