by Don DeLillo
First published 2010
Richard Elster sits in the desert somewhere south of nowhere, trying to forget his time advising government war planners on troop deployment and counterinsurgency. The former scholar retreated here seeking space and geologic time after his stint in the war machine. Filmmaker Jim Finley arrives with a proposal: create a single-take documentary with Elster as the sole subject, just a man against a wall. The two men establish an uneasy routine in the isolation. When Elster's daughter Jessica visits from New York, her otherworldly presence shifts everything between them. The three build something resembling intimacy as they talk and train binoculars on the stark landscape. But a devastating event shatters their fragile arrangement. In the aftermath, a human mystery lingers in both the desert expanse and the recesses of memory.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Desert, New York
Period: 21st Century
117 pages · Hardcover · Scribner
Content warnings: war