Point Omega is Don DeLillo’s fifteenth novel.

At the end of a period working for government war planners, Richard Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by Jim Finley, a filmmaker intent on documenting Elster’s experience in a one-take film with Elster its single character. Elster came to the attention of the government because of an article he wrote explicating and parsing the word “rendition”.

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film but doesn’t seem to get anywhere. Then Jessie, Elster’s daughter, arrives but nothing seems to change very much until Elster and Finley come back from a shopping trip to find she has disappeared.

The novel is about loss of course and how we react to different types of loss in our lives and how there is a point of no return from the hopelessness, hence the Point Omega of the title, where omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet.

What is confusing is that the story takes place between two descriptions of an experience in a New York art gallery where a slow “rendition” of the film Psycho is playing as an art installation and how a man views the people in attendance. Whether the man is meant to be Elster or Finlay, I don’t know.