12. Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Category: 50 Books

12. Point Omega by Don DeLillo

This was a weird little novella. I know DeLillo has written many books, but this is the first one I’ve read. I’m going to give another one a chance because this one didn’t seem very good. And what I mean by that is not that the author is bad, in fact I would say the author is great, but the story is so… incomplete.

I would compare this author to Paul Auster in that the writing is real “thinky” and the characters all seem to be drowning in aloneness. (but none of the awesome metafiction of Auster’s that I so love.)

There are only a handful of characters in this and I didn’t really care about any of them. They all seemed too self-absorbed, and not in a snotty, “I’m so important.” kind of way, but in that way that people who are autistic (or Asperger’s or whatnot) where they don’t really consider other people.

The jacket cover says it’s about a guy (a filmaker) who wants to make a documentary-type film about this other guy who was some kind of Department of Defense guy (but he wasn’t military, he was some kind of thinktank guy) during the war. But that description makes the book sound like it has an actual plot. I don’t think it does.

There was a really good sentence in it though: “Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?”

Obviously there was more than one good sentence in the book but it’s that sentence that makes me want to give another of DeLillo’s books a try.

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