Point Omega is a novel by Don Delillo, published in early 2010. The premise of the book is that an independent filmmaker wishes to make a documentary about a "defense intellectual", and travels to his vacation home in the deserts of California to do so. It is a fairly thin plot, but it is a short book (just over a hundred pages), and it is also written by the dean of American post-modernist writers, so richness of plot and character is perhaps not necessary. Despite the set-up, and the references to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the Omega Point, this is not a William Gibson novel.
The book is sandwiched between two scenes of someone watching the film Psycho in slow motion at an art exhibit. During the book proper, the filmmaker meets with the "defense intellectual", has a few conversations about war and the theological concept of the Omega Point, and has a fleeting attraction to the filmmaker's daughter. The daughter disappears, and the last few chapters of the book describe the futile search for her. And, while it was a disappointment to have no denoument, that is part of post-modernist literature.
The largest puzzle of the book for me is that even knowing something about Don Dellilo's general themes, I don't know what lens to view this work through. Is this work a statement on the war in Iraq? Is it about theology? Is the presence of the desert a symbol for man's isolation in the cosmos? Is the book meant to be mostly about the human interaction of the characters (which seems unlikely, given the terseness with which they are described). Is this book an exercise in absurdism? What does Psycho in slow motion have to do with it? It could just be that I haven't allowed the work to sink in deep enough, or perhaps I just lack the delicate literary sensibility to understand the message being presented. Or perhaps, as many have said before, post-modernist literature has a very large wank factor included.