Victory Point

In Victory Point, Owen D. Pomrey allows us to explore a meticulously rendered and slightly worn architectural marvel of modern design (named Victory Point). The town, 90 years old and never completed, is a beautiful place: a destination for students of architecture but "merely" home to its residents—an example of how we can value and make a place for ourselves even in the midst of a failure to achieve purpose. And how maybe that can even be enough.

Ellen Small's life reflects and is reflected by Victory Point. She escaped the experimental town a decade ago but arrives on a visit to her father, who remains. Much of the short book is spent on Ellen wandering the streets and vistas she grew up with, both alienated and alienating. She feels uncomfortable in this place pregnant with depth and meaning, its streets a reminder and her old classmates an albatross. Simultaneously, there are charms that bring back nostalgia and sentiment.

Like most things, Victory Point isn't a singularity. It exists as this, as that, and as other things. To Ellen. To her father. To the people she meets along the way.

Victory Point is a quiet book. There is dialogue, conversation. But these words exist as punctuations to the observation of humanity's effort to mark nature. Nature takes and takes, but Victory Point is at least one man's intention to harness a piece of the world, to carve out a better world for humanity, even if a smaller world. From the beginning, Ellen rejects that world by living away in the city, where the architecture is less a subjugation of nature and more an obliteration of it. Victory Point (the book) is about the pull and draw of Victory Point (the town) and the question of whether the words it whispers can tempt Ellen.

 

 

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