FICTION:Don DeLillo's preoccupation with the 'now' sets his latest narrative against an entrancing visual device
IF YOU look closely enough, you begin to see. The surest way to do this is to slow everything down; time itself has to be reduced to crawling pace. US master, Don DeLillo, author of the spectacular epic Underworld(1998), saw this for himself while gazing at a video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, which subjected Hitchcock's classic to a frame-by-frame deconstruction. The film was slowed down, the images released at a snail's pace, which took an entire day. That artwork experience is the inspiration for Point Omega,a slim, elegant, cryptic but by no means slight, study in meaning. A viewer stands entranced in the gallery, watching the film in its frozen version. "This was history he was watching in a way, a movie known to people everywhere. He played with the idea that the gallery was like a preserved site, a dead poet's cottage or hushed tomb, a medieval chapel."
His watching has become a solitary vigil.People come and go, wary, uncertain what to make of it. Others simply leave. Then he notices the arrival of two men, “the older man using a cane and wearing a suit that looked long travelled in . . . film scholar perhaps, and the younger man in a casual shirt, jeans and running shoes, the assistant professor, lean, a little nervous”. For the viewer, it is his fifth day. He has come and watched for hours. “Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress.”
Second by second the movie unfolds with a new intensity. But then, intensity has always been the essence of DeLillo's random but exact, all-seeing art. In this new novel, really a novella, the young man at the gallery, the lean, nervous one wearing running shoes, is Jim Finley, a film-maker with a new project. He wants to persuade the older man, Richard Elster, an academic who had been recruited by the US government to assist its war planners, to feature in a film proposed by him. Finley refers to Aleksandr Sokurov's magical Russian Ark, "A single extended shot, about a thousand actors and extras, three orchestras, history, fantasy, crowd scenes, ballroom scenes . . .". All Finley wants is for Elster to stand against a wall, a carefully selected wall, and talk. It takes some discussion.
Elster isn't interested. But later, he summons Finley to his ramshackle house somewhere in the desert. Their discussions are long, edgy and full of pauses, the sort of dialogue De Lillo excels at. De Lillo is well aware that conversation – halting, fluent, excited – is what we humans do. He first made that observation as long ago as The Names(1982), a mesmeric study of displacement, his unsung masterpiece about everything and nothing. In it he writes: "Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile." Point Omegain its abstract philosophy recalls The Names – albeit pared down, cryptic. But the DeLillo novel it most echoes is Mao II(1991). It was in that book, an offbeat parable, that DeLillo, who had announced in The Names that "Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating", conceded that the image had finally supplanted the word. The visual had overtaken the spoken.
JUST AS JG BALLARD created surreal visions that have come true, DeLillo, shaped by John Dos Passos and William Gaddis, is another seer. Mao IIfeatures Bill Gray, a reclusive writer whose face has long faded from the public memory. He lives in seclusion with his menacing assistant Scott who guards Gray's manuscripts as if they are secret documents – which they have in fact become. Long tormented by an unfinished novel Gray decides it is time he has his picture taken. Brita, a female photographer interested in writers, is assigned the task. As Gray poses he speaks with a fluency which surprises him. "There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists," he declares, "In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness." Gray and Brita engage in a conversation about the then relatively new Twin Towers that, in the cold light of history, now seems almost prophetic.
There is no denying that the great Gaddis was there before DeLillo, but that is no criticism. Gaddis was hearingAmerica; DeLillo has been listening, logging the vulnerabilities. For most of his career he has been tracking his country and while White Noise(1984) was inspired comic satire, DeLillo has captured the paranoia, the hysteria. Cormac McCarthy, in his fiction, has concentrated on the apocalyptic violence; DeLillo has looked to the fear, which explains why his novels are far more terrifying: Libra(1988) explored America's communal agony and shame through a fictional portrait of the definitive anti-hero, Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, the self-styled "agent of history". In Falling Man(2007), the stories of several lives overlap and are dominated by the unforgettable image of a man in a suit choosing to fall to his death from one of the Twin Towers. That image is then replicated by a performance artist. In Point Omegathe ever laconic DeLillo is again engaged in a quest; Finley needs more than a prophet for his film; he seeks a truth teller.
As the pair sit in Elster’s desert hide-out, eating omelettes, Elster is really addressing himself, his past, but knows he requires an audience. “Time falling away. That’s what I feel here . . . Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past.” Muted conversations, random but directed. Film-maker and subject, hunter and prey, sit it out and then are joined by Elster’s grown daughter, Jessie, who arrives unexpectedly, and disappears as abruptly.
All the icons fade in Point Omegaand are reduced to the size of the drain in the shower and the rings in the ripped shower curtain while that most famous of screen murders takes place in slow motion. The massive narrative that is Underworldis contained in the image of a baseball rendered mythic through its role in a freak home run that blasted into history. DeLillo may have a satirical bent, and does, but he is ultimately more given to elegy. There is poignancy in choosing to juxtapose the famous clash between the Giants and the Dodgers on October 3rd, 1951, with the news of the Soviet testing of a nuclear bomb. Both share the next day's headlines. That ball, a shabby baseball passing from hand to hand over the years is the unifying device of Underworld,just as the images from Psycho define Point Omega.
There is a line in Underworldwhen Nick, a characteristic DeLillo anti-hero, remarks after his mother's death: "The long ghosts are walking in the halls." It may as well be Camelot as the desert, a favourite DeLillo location. Point Omega, also set largely in a desert, has that sense of finality, of a world being pared down to its essence. And that essence is uncertainty.
THIS IS AN important, post-terrorism novel not just for DeLillo, but for US fiction. It comes at a time when most of the post-second World War giants are dead: Gaddis, Bellow and Updike the artists; Mailer the chronicler; Heller and Vonnegut the comedians with a message; Burroughs the pulse. Most would agree that Richard Ford articulated the US’s Bush nightmare in The Lay of the Land (2006). But of the survivors of that somewhat older, pre-Ford, generation – Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, McCarthy – DeLillo, now 73, was always an original. He has always watched and listened, taken on popular culture, the environment, waste disposal, weaponry, cultural nuance, ethnic minorities and national paranoia. His characters represent the US on the run from itself, from Iraq, from a “now” weighted by history – the now that has always, since the publication of his debut Americana in 1971, preoccupied DonDe Lillo.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty(Liberties Press)
