Don DeLillo's Point Omega is a hard book to critique because it is chock-full of brilliance and ought to be supported simply because we need books that allow humanity to think about the condition of being human. But, in fact, Point Omega's excess of thought and brilliance is its biggest problem. Slight though it may be, the book totters under the burden of its complexity. At its arid heart is Richard Elster, "a defense intellectual" who, even before our government started its unconstitutional moral experiments, wrote a scholarly essay titled "Renditions." Its first sentence is "A government is a criminal enterprise," but the bulk of it is "a study of the word rendition, with references to Middle English, Old French, Vulgar Latin," in which "he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country
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