Despite the fact that Point Omega, his new novel, is written in Don DeLillo's hushed incantatory style, it deals with sharply pressing contemporary matters. Richard Elster is an aging scholar, almost a shaman, someone with a knack for making sense of things, offering meanings to global shiftings and large questions. He has been asked by U.S. war planners to conceptualize what they are doing, to spend two years looking at classified documents which deal with matters such as the surge of troops, counterinsurgency, renditions. His job is to map them, move them from their inchoate contingency, somehow make them real, offer a verbal context which might finally make sense of them.

A New York filmmaker now wants to shoot a documentary about Elster, do it in real time, in one take. They both move to a house in the desert to talk. Although nothing happens at first, there is a shimmering mystery attached to every word they say, their every gesture and movement. Soon, they are joined by Elster’s daughter, who adds to this melange of half-made connections—conversations which have an incredible mixture of the poetic and the apocalyptic. The intensity is increased by the creaking house, the desert landscape, and the sense of a New York City which has been left behind as a place of desperate loneliness, filled with noise that has served only to distract, mislead, and sadden.

The novel, DeLillo’s 15th, published this month, is framed by the 24-hour slowed-down version of Psycho, made by the artist Douglas Gordon, showing at MoMA, which questions the very essence of time and movement, of reality itself. DeLillo’s every sentence is chiseled, filled with coiled power ready to spring. His sense of the contemporary world on the verge of catastrophe—in desperate search for a footing or definition to rescue it, or offer it meaning, or impel it somewhere else—is palpable in every line of this extraordinary novel.