Ratner's Star

[Joe Varo]

I realize that this doesn't deal with Pynchon, but it seems to me that
there are some Delillo fans on the list and that someone (was it Richard
Romeo?) mentioned that they were reading Ratner's Star. So, lacking any
knowledge of any extant Delillo list, I'm going to ask my question here:

Could someone PLEASE explain to me what in the world Ratner's Star is
about? I just finished it today, and, for the life of me, just can't
figure out what in the world was the whole POINT of the book.

Here's what I get out of it: 

A bunch of really odd scientists congregate at Field Experiment One,
ostensibly to decipher some message from outerspace, supposedly from
Ratner's star. There's one scientist who spends his life in a cave,
digging.

Then we switch to some underground facility where a rather bizarre group
of scientist and one journalist are working on Logicon, a method of
communicating in pure logic, but there are problems because they need a
metalanguage.

During all of this we discover that the message from outerspace didn't
come from Ratner's star, there's no need to decipher it, and there is an
unexpected solar eclipse.

I dunno...but I just don't get it. If there's a message in this book, it
went completely over my head. Maybe the older I get, the more dense I
become. 

HELP!

Joe