This page lists the known contemporary reviews of Don DeLillo's 1991 novel, Mao II.
Terrorists, Moonies, eccentric artists and reclusive writers - Mao II gathers them all in a world that is full of crowds but promises little more than the isolation of the homeless. DeLillo's genius, however, is to question rather than to condemn - to ask, as does the father of Karen, his wanly pliable ex-Moonie, "When the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the expended faith?"Because there is still a struggle over such faith - a struggle between novelists and terrorists, between messiahs and message-makers - Mao II suggests our current syle of life may not be meaningless after all. Rather, it is a life-or-death contest among those who would define meaning.
One of DeLillo's points is that writers have become famous for not writing, famous for drinking, for blowing their heads off, and now, this new opportunity: as hostage. Bill Gray is drawn to Beirut, a city of anonymous terror, small cells and isolation. It is an environment hie feels he is uniquely suited for. "Isolation ... the root thing he'd been rehearsing all these years." The events in Mao II don't culminate in a single apocalyptic moment. They quietly arrive at a point that seems both improbable and inevitable.
But this novel is simultaneously too explicit and too loose with its ideas. "The world is full of abandoned meanings" he writes in White Noise - but so is this novel, to some extent. Ideas lie about in it, in blocks and formations. The novel is a compendium of brilliant apocalytic suggestions. DeLillo watches our disasters, savours our last moments. Something is missing. At such times, DeLillo's vision resembles an eschatology without a theology.
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.
DeLillo's satirical portrait of a modern publisher is wickedly satisfying, and his talent for moral suspense, reminiscent of Graham Greene's, makes a splendid portrait of the ambiguous Arab intermediary between Gray and the terrorists. And nobody, of course, is better placed to write about the poisonous exposure and solitary agony of the contemporary writer.Perhaps, in fact, DeLillo is too close.
Mao II is a more somber work, less concentrated as a narrative; and it is shorter than either of its predecessors. The cast of characters is relatively small, and the characters themselves, while sharply delineated, are perhaps less interesting in the long run than the images and themes that cluster around them.
Although Mr. DeLillo's novels have also been criticized for their willful topicality - everything from chemical accidents to terrorist raids to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy seems to leap from the headlines into his books - he does not, like Warhol, simply exploit such events. Rather, he implants these sordid bits of news in his novels, much the way Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg insert pieces of reality into their work, provoking his audience into a reappraisal of a chaotic and mysterious world.
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?"
... it will be apparent to readers of DeLillo's work that all the familiar elements are here: fanaticism, obsession, and impending cataclysm.How DeLillo contrives to fashion interesting novels from material like this is always a puzzle, since he seems so indifferent to most of the textbook principles of storytelling - things like "character development," plots that reward expectations, verisimilitude to ordinary experience. His people are cartoonish, puppets of their fixactions, but they are often hard to forget. His stories tend to fizzle out inconclusively, but they are suspenseful.
Though powerful and painful to read, Mao II can sound like the "Nightline" of novels - glib, important in some sense, but finally more impressive than persuasive. What makes it worth reading is that DeLillo is a better storyteller than he is a thinker. When he gives his characters room to breathe and forgets about tidying up life's loose ends, he creates scenes of memorable and disturbing clarity.
With each book DeLillo's prose has grown more direct, his ideas more dense, his takes on the world more dark. Mao II is brooding and solemn even for DeLillo, yet it is a beautifully readable, haunting tale that jolts along at its own unsettling, disjunctive pace. It opens with a mass marriage aimed at "the end of human history": 13,000 Moonies joined into couples in Yankee Stadium under the presiding gaze of Master Moon, who has chosen mates by matching up photographs. It closes with issues of liberation and terrorism in Beirut and an extraordinary vision of another weddding, ordained by other gods, in a war-battered city.
Mao II is not only a disturbing work of fiction. It is a debate about the point and purpose of writing itself, about the survival or elimination of the individual at a time when history is passing to the crowd, about our inability to take seriously anyone other than the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for a faith.
Despite this careful, elaborate buildup, Mao II is not really about the paranoia of a writer who has lost touch with his talent. DeLillo uses Bill Gray as one extreme in a taut, fully dramatized dialectic about the future. Opposed to Bill are the forces epitomized by the image of Mao Zedong, all those who argue that the world has grown too crowded for the individual and that the only salvation lies in the dissolution of personalities into the single-headed throng.
As in many of Warhol's picture sof the famous dead, drastically altered context and delirious repetition make for an oddly cogent comment on an already ubiquitous image. Scott, at MoMA's Warhol retrospective, wonders if he had ever before realized "the deeper meaning of Mao", and Mao II leaves us asking ourselves the same question of the "grand narratives" that unfold on our television screens. Prompting us to recognize that it is our familiarity with these images of terror which is struly strange. DeLillo demonstrates with compelling artistry his conviction that the novel can accommodate and shape our catastrophic present.
An eye-opening yet suffocating read, Mao II has the literary acoustics of an amplified string quartet performing in a football stadium. The gulf war, especially its absurd attendant catastrophes, seems an inevitable subject for DeLillo, with his satellite-dish eye for international chaos and his sensitivity to individual pain. At this point, however, that almost sounds more like a curse than encouragement
Mao II is DeLillo's 10th novel and it is one of his best. The basic features will be familiar to his readers immediately: the terrorists and conspiracies, the obsession with media images, the off-kilter characters who act like surviors of a future that hasn't yet arrived and the relentless one-sentence snapshots that tell us what we really thing about our times. Mao II is also DeLillo's strongest statement yet about the crisis of crises. Namely: that we are living in the last violet twilight of the individual, and that "the future belongs to crowds."