A review by rebus
Point Omega by Don DeLillo

4.25

DeLillo became a little bit hit or miss after Underworld, but he mostly hits the mark here, taking on government, eschatology, technology, and religion in his usual inimitable and dryly humorous manner. It's particularly relevant that it came in the wake of the war on terror, with the Elster character boldly stating that a government is a criminal enterprise. The deep analysis goes to the heart of civilization, with Elster suggesting that cities were built to measure time--time itself a mode of fascism used to control people--and to strip it from nature (hinting that when we strip away all the surfaces, only the terror remains, which literature was meant to alleviate). 

That terror comes in the form of statements about us being a crowd or a swarm, thinking in groups and with a gene set for self destruction now that our consciousness has been exhausted and we want to return to dust and inorganic matter. The real life Art Show at the center of the tale, Hitchcock's film Psycho slowed down in order to have a 24 hour running time, is a fascinating take on the ennui of our times, a metaphor for the psychopathic behavior of the US and our blase response to both art installation and our government as one that could view it all as comedy. 

DeLillo knows that it's no comedy for the 4 billion people enslaved to white privilege, and this book is one of his earlier cries out against the apocalypse.