![]() ![]() But whereas Bellow had distinct affinities with these aggrieved, arrogant, labyrinthine souls, DeLillo seems temperamentally a million miles away from the type, and his impersonation is as interesting for what it omits as what it includes. And for a while Elster does come on a bit like one of Bellow's brilliant, unpleasant thinkers, spinning out skeins of philosophy from, say, the sensation of biting the dead skin off his thumb, or talking cleverly about such things as the many meanings of the word "rendition". The set-up seems to promise a Bellovian portrait of the hyper-educated theoretician sullied by his brush with power. The desert landscape, beautifully evoked, is conducive to such thoughts. For now, he is more in the mood to sit and reflect on grand subjects such as time, extinction and the attainment of what Teilhard de Chardin called the Omega Point: a zen-like state of relinquished consciousness. ![]() ![]() The film-maker, Jim Finley, wants to film Elster talking about his two years at the Pentagon, but Elster is resisting. The Iraq war, he ruefully recalls assuring them, would be a "Haiku" war a "war in three lines". Most of the novella takes place in the California desert, where a film-maker is visiting the retreat of an ageing neo-con intellectual, Richard Elster, who, like Wolfowitz and the rest, was brought out from under his rock by the Bush administration and obligingly told his patrons everything they wanted to hear. ![]()
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