DeLillo’s career has seen highs and lows—after the publication of Underworld in 1997 it has sunk into a disquietingly lengthy trough—and if we had only his two or three worst novels, his critics might almost be right. At first, Point Omega has the disheartening feel of having been written by a technically proficient and uninspired imitator of DeLillo’s work. Some critics have tried to see the novel’s defects as experimental virtues, misguided perhaps by deference in the face of DeLillo’s advanced age and assumed historical wisdom. Yet it is probably more accurate to see Point Omega not as “an object lesson in the methods of late-phase literature in general,” as Guardian book reviewer James Lasdun has written, but rather as an object lesson in its characteristic pitfalls.

For Lasdun, Point Omega has substituted an introspective formalism for the epic scope and grandeur that characterized much of DeLillo’s earlier material. Point Omega, he contends, relies for its success not on the powerful impact and attraction with which the novelist compels the reader to take notice, but rather on gently drawing his participation into a train of thought whose profounder conclusions are suggested only obliquely. This contention is not persuasive. One need not take issue with the questionable supposition that novelists become more introspective as they approach old age and death—a claim which, even if there were more evidence for it than Lasdun proffers, ought to incline suspicious minds to be wary lest what they take for thoughtful introspection be not mere senility. Most reviewers have remarked upon the novel’s formal minimalism, a focus on momentary thoughts or sensations so close-up as to render their background distant and indeterminate. Sam Anderson even describes Point Omega as having achieved a formal “breakthrough”: “It brings us, in just over 100 pages, as close to pure stasis as we’re ever likely to get.” Yet DeLillo relies on precisely the opposite to keep the reader interested: the cheap thrill of current events, of the transient qua transient. Loosely based on Errol Morris’s portrayal of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, the protagonist is Richard Elster, a neoconservative intellectual who achieved notoriety by providing erudite and sophistic justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in close consultation with the Pentagon.