In his 2010 novel, Point Omega, Don DeLillo explores hotly contested social issues through a proverbial wide angle lens. This book elevates the personal to the global and reduces the seemingly far-reaching advances of human civilization once again to the harsh yet unspeakably beautiful scale of the natural world. DeLillo invites readers to consider characters within their environments and to observe how they change when stepping outside. Writing about people's relationships to art as self-expression and to life itself as art, he takes an integrated stance upon the role of art in society and art outside society, within the still unexplored depths of the self.
Richard Elster is a man in his seventies who is called in for one last assignment by the U.S. War Department. He is tasked with a mission so secret even the reader is not allowed to know, but Elster himself takes it to mean he must write a haiku upon which the future of warfare rides. Approaching this monumental task with his own stubborn will, Elster moves to the desert and begins remembering. Anger surfaces. All the while, Jim Finley is following Elster as he documents his life for an art film largely describing solitude. In his artistic process, Elster becomes both author and subject, a fitting dichotomy of the complex relationship of the creator to the creative work.
When DeLillo introduces the character of Jessie, Elster's adult daughter, he gives the reader a foothold in the otherwise constantly shifting narrative. She is the representative of society. She enters the equation and changes the two men's dynamic, just with her presence and her care for her father. Without a second thought to either the poem or the film, Jessie tends to the practical needs of the situation which seem to be slipping through the cracks. This does not mean she doesn't notice or experience pain; however, she lacks the ability to communicate these experiences. She relies upon her father to compensate, in turn, for her own lack of social acumen. Thus even the social representative doesn't entirely fit into the presented format of society, resulting in a nuanced triangle formed by three people trying to process their quickly changing lives in a world that seems to want to reduce them each to data points.
