Black Ops

Don DeLillo’s new novel shines his high-powered perception on the unseen policy makers in the U.S. war on terror.

Point Omega
By Don DeLillo (Scribner)

The phrase “extraordinary rendition” is a baroque euphemism applied to the U.S. government’s recent program of covert extradition, isolation, and, allegedly, torture of suspected terrorists. American master DeLillo takes it as an impetus for his short, haunting new novel, in which a former government adviser—an intellectual recruited by the U.S. to help frame its war plan—retreats to a remote desert outpost to decompress after his service. A filmmaker visits him, hoping to document the scholar’s role in the war effort in a one-take film—“just a man against a wall,” as the filmmaker puts it. Soon, the former adviser’s enigmatic daughter joins them in the desert.

In New York City, another man, an anonymous loner, stands against a wall in a darkened museum gallery watching 24-Hour Psycho, a video work consisting of the Hitchcock film projected on a screen at two frames per second, stretched out to a 24-hour running time.

When these two storylines—charged with meaning, abstraction, and disconnection—eventually cross, they might as well be live wires.
—John Bolster