Rebecca Shapiro

An omega point, as defined by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is the supreme point of complexity and consciousness to which the universe is always striving. It is curious, then, that the postmodernist master Don DeLillo chooses this as the title of his very succinct latest work, clocking in at only 128 pages and seemingly, at first glance, less sweeping in scope than his previous novels. But, as one might expect from DeLillo, this sparse, beautifully crafted modern fable packs a solid punch.

Bookended by haunting scenes of a museum exhibit that has stretched Hitchcock’s Psycho to a full 24 hours,the novel focuses on Richard Elster, a curmudgeonly former war strategist who has retreated to a remote California desert. He is joined by Jim Finley, a young filmmaker escaping his own demons back East, who is intent on making a bare-bones, one-take documentary of Elster. As the visit stretches on, the pair engages in typical DeLillo-esque intellectual banter—tackling death, war, art, etc. Soon, Elster’s grown daughter Jessie shows up, exiled from New York in the hopes that she’ll escape an unwelcome suitor, and the trio forms an awkward but strangely functional family, sharing space, omelet dinners and the strange, beautiful desert that surrounds them. This is, of course, the calm before the storm.

DeLillo’s latest novel is also his most human—his characters are strikingly emotional, particularly in times of profound stress. When tragedy strikes Elster’s family, he—the scholar—crumbles, making almost obsolete the preceding intellectualizing. It is fitting, then, that DeLillo has inverted Teilhard de Chardin’s term for his title. Elster’s desert compound is perhaps the antithesis of the most complex point of consciousness to which the modern world strives, but within it lies something deeper and all the more harrowing.

Rebecca Shapiro is an assistant editor at the Random House Publishing Group.

Thirteen-year-old Mathilda Savitch doesn’t see the world like most people. Something inside of her wants to be bad—and not just breaking the supper dishes on purpose bad, but really core-shakingly awful. Her sister Helene has been dead for a year, and Mathilda’s parents are spiraling into complete dysfunction—her mother has become a full-blown alcoholic, which overwhelms her father to the point that neither is paying much attention to Mathilda at all.

Mathilda, too, is reeling with grief in her own way, becoming obsessed with the circumstances of her sister’s death. She roots through Helene’s perfectly preserved room and realizes that she can use the relics of her sister’s old life to both haunt her parents and dig deeper into the person Helene was and how she came to die.

Though the circumstances surrounding Mathilda’s family are unthinkable, they are not the only formidable forces in her young life. There has recently been a new wave of terror attacks, which Lodato implies are the first major ones since September 11. Mathilda’s cool indifference and her bizarre way of thinking about the world are particularly fascinating in the face of what has become a crisis to everyone else.

Mathilda isn’t just a monster, though—there are moments of deep compassion that not only make her a sympathetic narrator, but also one of the most interesting new voices in fiction. Lodato’s absolutely incredible rendering of her narration, ripe with as much humor as darkness, is what makes this masterful novel shine so brightly. If The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time had an evil twin, it would be Mathilda Savitch.

Rebecca Shapiro is an Assistant Editor at the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc..

If anyone could be considered an heir to Vladimir Nabokov’s legendary narrative trickery, it would be Paul Auster—a master of literary illusion whose novels have long been lauded for their intricate puzzles and bold subversion of traditional narrative structure. In recent years, though, Auster has used a lighter hand, and novels like The Brooklyn Follies suggested that he might be exchanging his signature postmodernism for more character-driven, even sentimental fiction. With his 15th novel, Auster has somehow balanced the two, creating in his winding maze of literary questions a searing, emotional bildungsroman.

Invisible opens in 1967 when Adam Walker, a bored Columbia undergraduate, is seduced, both literally and figuratively, by a charismatic Parisian couple he meets at a party—a visiting professor and his sad, sexy girlfriend. The professor makes Adam an incredible offer—financial backing for his own literary magazine. But Adam learns quickly that things that seem too good to be true are often just that. Forty years later, he contacts a former classmate, now a book editor, for help in telling his story—a life-changing incident, its aftermath and how it shaped his troubled life.

Perhaps his best trick is one of the oldest in the book—Auster alternates between narrative voices, telling the first section in the first person, the second in the second person and the third in the third person. With anyone else at the helm, this could feel like an MFA exercise gone awry. But Auster thoroughly engages with each voice and weaves them together so seamlessly that it becomes the most effective interrogation of narrative reliability in recent memory. At the end of the novel, it is literally impossible to understand, in the story’s many layers, the difference between fact and fiction.

With an overwhelming, often totally shocking story, Auster brings in the most universal, most difficult themes—guilt, love, anger, family and friendship, to name just a few. Powerful not only in form but also in feeling, Invisible is truly a masterpiece—Auster’s best, most complete effort in years.

Rebecca Shapiro writes from Brooklyn, New York.