My favorite thing about Spring Break is that it’s a little glimpse of the more substantial vacation just four or five torturous weeks away. It gives me some much-needed time to lie on the sofa or sit at a coffee shop, my legs propped up, and read books I haven’t been told to read.
Yesterday, I picked up Don Delillo’s Point Omega, which I’d been wanting to read since I saw a fantastic review a month or two ago. It’s super-short, and I read it in only three or four hours. And I read slowly. This isn’t a book review (I don’t write book reviews), so all I’m going to say is that it’s fantastic. The whole thing is basically a slowing down of time:
It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.
I liked this novel in the same way I liked White Noise – it’s the same kind of cultural critique that makes you feel a bit empty at the end. Makes me want to go on a Delillo binge, though I have a feeling I’d somehow emerge disappointed.
