This page lists the known reviews of Don DeLillo's 1991 novel, Mao II.
Chicago Tribune Book World: June 23, 1991 - review of Mao II by Jerome Klinkowitz.
Commonweal: August 9, 1991 - review of Mao II by Mark Feeney.
Globe and Mail (Toronto): June 22, 1991 - "The curator of menace" review of Mao II by Don Gillmor.
Guardian (Manchester): August 29, 1991 - "The face in the crowd" review of Mao II by James Wood, p. 22.
The Independent (U.K.): September 8, 1991 - "Thoroughly Post-Modern Millenium" review of Mao II by Martin Amis, Sunday Review p. 28.
London Review of Books: Sept 12, 1991 (Vol. 13, No. 17) - "Oh my oh my oh my" review of Mao II (and Introducing Don DeLillo) by John Lanchester.
The centrality of DeLillo's subject-matter is accompanied by an extreme quirkiness of vision and manner, and by a strange, paranoid, exhilarating comedy unlike that of any other writer now practising in English. His books are written not so much in paragraphs as in riffs, riffs which tend to be halfway between a thesis and an aria, and which more often than not are put into the mouth of one of DeLillo’s characters: the effect is of a Babel of voices talking brilliantly/derangedly.
Los Angeles Times Book Review: June 9, 1991 - "Hermetically Seared" review of Mao II by Richard Eder.
Newsweek: June 3, 1991 - short review of Mao II by Malcolm Jones Jr, p. 61.
New Yorker: June 24, 1991 - "Market Report" review of Mao II by Louis Menand, pp. 81-84.
New York Review of Books: June 27, 1991 - review of Mao II by Robert Towers, p. 18.
New York Times: May 28, 1991 - "Fighting Against Envelopment by the Mass Mind" review of Mao II by Michiko Kakutani.
New York Times Book Review: June 9, 1991 - "Look for a Writer and Find a Terrorist" review of Mao II by Lorrie Moore.
As with so much of Mr. DeLillo's work, the novel has a discursive sweep, and its narrative movement from serious idea to serious idea is rigorously un-neat, like the gathering and associative movement of the brain itself. But as a story about a reclusive writer, written by a reclusive writer, it has a sense of humor. Early on in the novel, a mad street person, "great-maned and filthy, rimed saliva in his beard, old bruises across the forehead gone soft and crumbly," bursts into a bookstore; "I'm here to sign my books," he tells the security guard. Later, when the protagonist, a novelist named Bill Gray, falls into the company of a Maoist terrorist sympathizer, their tense conversation takes an unexpected turn: "There's something I wanted to ask the other evening at dinner," says the other man. "Do you use a word processor?"
San Francisco Chronicle: June 9, 1991 - "DeLillo's Elegy to Language" review of Mao II by Paul Skenazy.
Time: June 10, 1991 - "Men Who Work Underground" review of Mao II by Paul Gray, p. 68.
Sunday Times (London): September 8, 1991 - "Meaningful relationships" review of Mao II by Anthony Clare, p. 6-7.
Times Literary Supplement (London): August 30, 1991 - "Shaping up to catastrophe" review of Mao II by Julian Loose, pp. 20-21.
Village Voice: June 18, 1991 - "Mao, Voyager" review of Mao II by Richard Gehr.
Washington Post Book World: May 26, 1991 - "The Future Belongs to Crowds" review of Mao II by Sven Birkerts.