DeLillo Book Reviews: Point Omega

"Review: Don DeLillo's Point Omega"

Even though this review wasn't written for a higher end publication, perhaps it should have been. Its author, Joshua Willey, gives an honest and fair appraisal of Point Omega while also taking into account the career path that DeLillo has been treading since the publication of The Body Artist in 2001 -- or, as Willey calls it, "the formal transformation of Don DeLillo."

Willey observes that we once associated DeLillo with "oversaturation," but now "we find him at his most empty." Yet instead of lamenting the loss of DeLillo's old style, Willey acknowledges that "DeLillo is breathing deeply now, and it suits him well." He even speculates on what may have actuated these formal changes in DeLillo's prose:

It is almost as if his subjects crossed a failsafe line. Perhaps it was no longer possible for him to write honestly about America in 2010 in the same voice he'd used in 1990.

This speculation is something that we could use a little bit more of right now. I applaud Willey for reviewing DeLillo's latest novel on its own terms, something that other, more "reputable" critics have had a tough time doing for the past decade or so.

Personally, I think we've yet to realize the full implications of DeLillo's "formal transformation," but I have suspicions that this period could turn out to be the most important one of his career. (Of course, some critics would certainly disagree with me. See, for example, Michiko Kakutani's review of Point Omega for The New York Times.)

DeLillo Book Reviews: a review of Falling Man

"Racing Against Reality"

In June of 2007, Andrew O'Hagan reviewed DeLillo's novel Falling Man for the New York Review of Books. The first half of O'Hagan's review contextualizes Falling Man better than any other that I've read. In short, he takes us through Players, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, and The Body Artist in order to show us that DeLillo -- with his discussions of plots, death, terrorism, and the World Trade Center -- had been leading us up to that "day of days" for a long time. As O'Hagan writes, 

To have something exist as your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature [...] but the meeting of September 11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival [...]

The second half of his review, however, takes a turn. O'Hagan writes that this connection between DeLillo and 9/11 is too strong, so that when the day actually comes, it "instantly blows DeLillo's lamp out." O'Hagan then builds on this point:

DeLillo the novelist prepared us for September 11, but he did not prepare himself for how such an episode might, in the way of denouements, instantly fly beyond the reach of his own powers. In a moment, the reality of the occasion seems to have burst the ripeness of his style, and he truly struggles in this book to say anything that doesn’t sound in a small way like a warning that comes too late. Reading Falling Man, one feels that September 11 is an event that is suddenly far ahead of him, far beyond what he knows, and so an air of tentative rehearsal resounds in an empty hall.

Although I respect O'Hagan's review, particularly the first half, I am not inclined to side with him and his dismissal of Falling Man. (In fact, I would like to spend a future blog post showing how DeLillo does succeed in this novel.) O'Hagan's review, like many that I've read, appears to argue for DeLillo's post-9/11 irrelevance. With the power of hindsight, one can reliably say that Point Omega has disproved this flimsy generalization about DeLillo.