Customer Reviews

Mao II

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Mao II is a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. In Delillo's canon, I rate it better than White Noise and on par with his massive opus, Underworld. Despite Mao II's relative brevity, the denseness of ideas contained within are staggering. This was easily one of the best books of the 1990's, if not the last quarter century. Right up there with Mason & Dixon, American Pastoral, and a few select other masterworks.

While the novel is composed of characters who appear, for the most part, throughout the story, the book is structured more as a series of vingettes. Delillo deals with many themes, but the primary one, I think, is the struggle between the individual and the 'masses' in contemporary society. In this regard, he traverses the same terrain as Marcuse in "One Dimensional Man" and Canetti in "The Power of Crowds". And, he does it on a global scale: touching upon everything from a Moonie wedding, to the rise of the Ayatollah in Iran, Chairman Mao in China, and of course, contemporary American society.

Other themes are: the power of images, terrorism and the narrative power of terrorists (this is 9 years before 9/11), the role of the artist (writer, photographer, etc), true belief, teachers and apprentices, and censorship, state and otherwise. All this woven together concisely with his meticulously sculpted sentences. I often pick up this book and randomly re-read various chapters; in this fashion, I've probably read the entire book 5 times.

Lastly, I've debated with friends whether Delillo's vision in Mao II is a bleak one or a hopeful one. Like the old "Lady and the Tiger" fable, it probably comes down to who you are more than any clear answer from him. However, I think the wedding scene at the end (against very dire circumstances that I won't give away here) points to at least some optimism for individuals (while providing a nice 'barbelling' of the novel with the mass wedding at the book's beginning).

That's just my take, but anyone reading this work will push their brains outward, regardless of their predispositions.

This is a younger, cooler DeLillo than his more recent work. Personally I think it is his best book. It is in my mind the most creative of his work. It is incredible to see such a unique approach to writing. It is like reading a poem with its lyrical riffs but it has a plot that matters.

The weakest facet of the book is that the dialogue often sounds false. Hearing DeLillo characters speak to each other is like listening to jazz -- not about exploring the realistic mind but the deeper surrealistic mind. These characters are bigger than reality. These particular people in this book have a charm that I don't think DeLillo ever again captured. This book is beautiful and about something that actually matters. While Creative Writing degrees muddle the pool of talent in much the same way that expansion teams in baseball lessened the overall talent on each MLB team, writing about something that matters to the world is quite an act of courage. It is wonderful to see a book that creates its own artistic terms and abides by them while sizzling the senses with creativity and wit. Also, what is superior about this book -- if you are considering which DeLillo book to read -- is that it is not that long. It is as self-indulgent as Underworld in style but it is more tightly woven and thus, in my opinion, a much better book. Simply, it is a quicker read.
At this time in our history this book is useful to understand the emotional side to terror, the conformist mind, power, politics and self-respect. DeLillo was way ahead of his time this way.

While many Americans blindly support the war on terror you have a thoughtful analysis of why terror exists at all, written way before Bin Laden turned against the US.

Mao II is a great introduction to DeLillo.

The felt power of DeLillo's prose, the bass of the storm, the intensely concentrated recognition-scenes in the corridors of Third World terror, the null domains of Manhattan and Beirut, two cities ravaged by their own modes of iniquity, blight, and cultural devastation, from the faux-iconic pop-artifacts of Warhol's Factory to the scorched earth policies of Middle East cabals. *Mao II* has, strangely, been shuffled aside in the DeLillo corpus, treated as an aberration, a minor work, an off-day, an ill-advised experiment. As in *The Body Artist*, the author seems especially to have written it for himself -- like his writer-surrogate Bill Gray, aloof in his tightly-caulked safehouse, gnarled, diehard, a true artist experimenting till the end, perceiving it all anew.

And DeLillo is an expert spectator. He knows how to jumpstart the reader's eye with each sentence, record the synaptic dissonance of individuals at the edge of disquiet, in transitory spaces, in windows of departure, like a snooping harrier throwing its falcon-shadow onto the tower block, a soul built and weathered by the preceding century.

And let's face it, *Mao II* is strange territory. The author is pushing hard to bridge the nighted gulf of Third World angst, analyze and dissolve the force-fed media fictions, the sound-bites and simulations, the BBC monotone, the petty moralizing. But throughout, his troubled and troubling characters hold it all together, headstrong, witty, brilliantly in thrall to the chemical lift of DeLillo's lyrical drug (the first 15 pages of this novel, describing a young woman's sojourn into the Sun Moon cult and her subsequent de-programming, is perhaps my favorite of all this author's writing).

Chockfull of ambition and in full career, DeLillo narrates what is left for us to consider....

Somewhere between the plastic tautologies of a silkscreened Mao Zedong (c/o Andy Warhol) and the wakening streets of bomb-scarred Beirut, *Mao II* reads like a speculative op-ed piece on the secret life of Thomas Pynchon (who contributes a jacket blurb), but deepens in perspective to encompass the loneliness of all writers, playing games with themselves and their public, addicted to secrecy, manic with espionage, racked by self-doubt -- a vampire in excelsior -- feeling the old virtuosity slip away.... DeLillo's writer-protagonist, Bill Gray, hamstrung by a 20-year work-in-progress that he will never publish, finds himself seeking new paradigms in the hostage-trading black market of Middle East factionalism, in a last-ditch attempt to put his war-machine back on track.

Confused? Just read the novel.

But *Mao II* was also written in response to the Tom Clancys of the world, using Middle East terrorism as a backdrop for paramilitary potboilers, the suffering and confusion of endangered peoples set against the insipid "patriot games" of Harrison Ford as NATO super-sleuth. DeLillo provides a tactile photomural of the way things "really are," in the tortured banalities of the interrogation-room, the tainted business of shelling and skirmishes and kidnappings, the child-soldier in soccer jersey and face-mask, phasing into the distant Western mythologizing of these scurvy kill-holes....

The central objection to *Mao II* (and most of his early novels) turns on the issue of characterization. By themselves, in roving solitude, DeLillo's creatures are intense and fascinating, providing a unique and often riveting outlook on our dazed and pretzelled epoch. But once they start to congregate, to cluster in twos and threes, the dialogue becomes surreal, histrionic, and overwritten, top-heavy with artifice and authorial intervention. Suddenly these sparkling personalities become little more than flamboyant glove-puppets soliloquizing the author's rhythmic prose-poetry (read his play, *Valparaiso*, for an undistilled example of this). Rather than speak *to* each other, they seem to drift into parallel monologues, each telepathically prescient of what the other is saying, *becoming* each other, finishing each other's thoughts, paring down images and ideas like Socratic counterparts speaking via satellite. Now, granted, dialogue like this may *occasionally* transpire in real life, and since it is the novelist's job to *select* momentous vectors in the history of the world for perfection and representation, we might see fit to fold our hands and suspend our pedestrian disbelief, but.... BUT....

I feel underqualified to defend the author's willful, er, "plasticity" here. I recognize it, it makes me uncomfortably aware of the text qua text, but with the exception of his earlier work I'm not prepared to denounce it as frailty or weakness. Sure, the characters in *White Noise*, *Libra*, and *Mao II* are often elaborate cartoons, postmodern scribbles, jerry-rigged nonentities, but somehow the strength of these novels has never abated for me. The text still hits me hard. Either DeLillo has become bored with point-blank mimesis, or else is attempting a strange and benighted agon with the Platonic dialogue, giving us unreal (or superreal), abstract characters whose words spiral up into the fiber-optic acumen of the Zeitgeist.

Bill, Scott, Karen, Brita, George, and the rest. Are they avatars of world-history or corpses wired for sound? Representative (wo)men or literary wallpaper? Concentrations of world-history or animatronic meat puppets? The text is out there -- the jury must decide for themselves.

Mao II is a reasonably short book that is by turns about a reclusive writer struggling with a book he knows that will never be finished and the people around him, and the struggles of terrorism and the middle east, cults and brain-washing. At times, this book written in 1991 is strangely prophetic of the September 11 events, and as in the other Delillo book I have read, New York city is a prominent location, the World Trade Centres ominous characters, prescient in their apparent eternity.

Bill is a writer who has been working on his third novel for decades. It has been finished, years ago, he now obsessively edits and reviews each and every page, never being completely satisfied with the results. In a lot of ways he enjoys being the faded recluse, enjoys being a writer who is not a commodity. Two other people live with him, Karen - a previous cult member - and Scott, once just a fan of Bill's but now a friend who helps tend to his affairs. In addition to this, Karen provides Bill with physical satisfaction, but the reasons for this are never really discussed or some into the story, in fact, I'm not entirely sure why that particularly subplot even existed.

A photographer, Brita, enters the cosy world the three have setup, and Bill allows her the first photos of him since he was a young man. They hit off, but more importantly, Bill's awareness of his place in the world is sparked once more. Soon he is meeting with his old editor and events take an odd and not exactly satisfactory turn, becoming more focused on the middle east and terrorism, and less on the life of a writer who is unhappy with himself.

From here, the novel deteriorates. While remaining technically enjoyable to read, I was much more interested in Bill's life than I was with Middle Eastern politics. The ending was unsatisfactory, and answered no questions - but then, what questions were raised? The plot involving Bill's redemption was dropped, and a subsequent development with a Swiss poet captured by terrorists in a bid to help raise the profile of the newly formed terror group and a literary community was not developed enough. Even Karen's cult background wasn't fully used.

Delillo's strengths are his prologues and his dialogue. The prologue was tight, forceful, and ended with a perfect sentence. It would have made a fantastic short story, and I felt that, once it was finished, I was in for an amazing ride. Dialogue is authentic, flows just like a real conversation, and contains many of the unfinished sentences and stray ramblings that people use when they talk. Both the prologue and the dialogues throughout felt as though they had been worked on, again and again, to get it right, while long stretches of plot or of description felt almost like an after-thought.

To conclude, I greatly enjoyed the first hundred and twenty pages or so. I didn't like the shift of focus, but a premise was built up that look promising, then that, too, was dropped. The result is an unfortunately hollow book. But perhaps I am missing something. It has received a lot of praise, and won awards, and I can't understand why. While written well, it just couldn't live up to the amazing prologue.

I am a fan of Don DeLillo's artistic ambition and his want to address ideas more profound than simple character study. When Tom Wolfe wrote his diatribe against MFA writing programs and accused them of passing along a tradition of meaningless, nonempathetic stories rather than work that addresses morality and social meaning, he undermined his own argument with his own bare-faced self-promotion of _The Bonfire of the Vanities_, a work that may in essence have fit his own ideal but was poorly structured and almost unreadable in the end.

But Wolfe had an interesting point, proof of which was the simple fact that his statements caused such ire and intellectual retaliation among the MFA community. In the end, Wolfe would have done better to have used DeLillo as his primary example of writing that aspires to his ideal. DeLillo writes about people, but in the broadest sense of the term. He dwells not only in his characters, which is often the stopping point for many short-minded fictioneers with an assumption that their characters are worth reading (which often means that they are not), but also what those characters mean to the society they are in. _Libra_ is a wonderful example of this, as is _White Noise_ and _Cosmopolis_. Even in works where DeLillo's representations remain as just representations and do not engage as characters themselves (_Ratner's Star_), I am always impressed with his artistic ambition. DeLillo has a lot to say about the world, both topically and philosophically. This book, _Mao II_, is one that dwells on many relatively recent events (the Reverend Moon mass wedding, Khomeni's death), but even when read in 2006, these events hold meaning to the central points DeLillo is out to address--the influence of mass character over singular character, and the effect of art on the human psyche (and in this book, he even allows terrorism to enter into the world of art).

_Mao II_ is a work of DeLillo nearly at his best. We deal with singular characters who resonate strongly off the page--there is Karen, a former Reverend Moon cultist who has been only partly relieved through deprogramming. There is Brita, a photographer who deals only writers as her subject. She manages to schedule a session with Bill, a legendary writer who has been self-reclusive and unsure about whether to relinquish his latest project onto the world. And there is his secretary/assistant/connection to the real world, Scott. Every one of these characters, and the characters to come as Bill is drawn into a plan to reveal himself at a benefit for a poet who has been kidnapped in Beirut, distinguish themselves through DeLillo's sharp and witty prose, but they also deal with philosophical concepts regarding society, indentity and art, and it is here that DeLillo is always at his finest. While in books like _The Names_, the characters overconsume the content and diffuse both, in _Mao II_, the characters are sharply intersting because of both their moments of sympathy and antipathy. In short, his characters feel fully fleshed out rather than spokespersons of philosophy, which was what dragged down books line _Ratner's Star_.

The work of any artist must be looked at in its entirety rather than by singular example. A great poet is not one who has written one great poem, but has written a canon of work that has sometimes produced godliness, often greatness, and sometimes total misses. DeLillo can be considered a great writer even in the misses, for what he tries to do often far surpasses the greatest work of mediocre writers who dwell too much in the immediate rather than the universal. _Mao II_ may not be one of his greatest works and may not be pondered and scribed over like _Underworld_ or _White Noise_, but it is a great book, and I think many a DeLillo fan will cherish it for its precision and its thinking.

This fascinating novel probes the connection between isolation and mass movements in the modern world. In doing so, DeLillo is intensely personal, creating memorable characters who are visually and emotionally there, on the page, in full brilliance and confusion. He also employs sublime writing, which captures experiences, images, or ideas of individual isolation or mass movements and then juxtaposes them, showing weird but profound connections. My favorite pages are 149-153, where DeLillo describes New York City's Tompkins Square in the early nineties. Then, drug abusers, the mentally ill, and the homeless turned this lovely neighborhood square into a shambling, threatening shantytown. If you missed it, DeLillo has saved the moment.

The central figure in this book is Bill Gray, an isolated writer with a wide and discerning following. Anyone who wants to write might ponder two of his insights: "Writing is bad for the soul when you get right down to it. It protects your worst tendencies." (page198); or, "It was the writing that caused his life to disappear." (page 215).

"Mao II" (1991), by Don DeLillo (b. 1936), is the story of Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist. He lives off royalties, supporting Scott, a live-in secretary, and Karen, a young lady with whom both men have a comfortable relationship. Bill is a hermit, supposedly working on a new book, but never appears in public or contacts anyone. Scott is his household helper, but also cajoles him when he gets lazy. Karen is a credulous and sensitive person who was a Moonie in the past, and finds individual life difficult.

Bill's agent tells him he has been asked to meet a terrorist group in Beirut, which has taken a hostage. He is to read a statement of support, at a London press conference, and the hostage will be released. He goes to London, but after some difficulties, steals away to Cyprus, unbeknownst to his agent, or to Scott and Karen. He accompanies a sympathizer of the Maoist group, hoping to meet the leader himself, perhaps in Beirut.

Will he make it to Beirut? Will he return to America? Will he meet the terrorists? Will he free the hostage, or will he be taken hostage himself? The book will answer these questions eventually, but more interesting are the deeper challenges DeLillo poses. He makes much of Chairman Mao throughout the book. In London and Cyprus, Bill speaks at length with the terror group's sympathizer, arguing over the nature of terrorism, socialism, totalitarianism, and other such matters. DeLillo discusses such organizations as the Shining Path, such world leaders as Khomeini (who died in 1989), and such events as the Tiananmen Square massacres (which occured in 1989).

DeLillo seems to ask, what makes a leader? What makes a follower? Why is Karen so credulous? Will she get caught by another cult? Is Scott a leader, perhaps a frustrated one? Why is Bill interested in these matters? Why is a terrorist leader interested in him? Does Bill remain an outsider just so he won't get inadvertently influenced by society's inevitable groupings?

Like a contemporary artist, DeLillo doesn't provide a didactic guide, but a curious exploration. He studies crowd behavior and credulity, as well as those (always men?) who manipulate others, or perhaps only superficially attempt it. Most remarkable that he addressed an issue in 1989 which is so relevant today, post-9/11, before Saddam Hussein, another manipulator, became such a household name. DeLillo remains artistically neutral, but seems to have more sympathy for freedom and individuality than group behavior, even though he understands the reasons for the latter. The reader may decide for themself.

The prose is lively. The dialog is interesting and idiomatic, if awkward at times, but most often clever. The tone is hustling and bustling, scrambled and chaotic, and contrasted with the literary seclusion of the countryside. This book is recommended for anyone who enjoys contemporary American fiction, or wants to reflect on the nature of crowd behavior, manipulative leaders, or terrorism. It will engage the curious reader and provoke them to thought.

DeLillo has written another gem with MAO II: A NOVEL. Much has been said about the details of this work, but I believe the entirety can be summed up in the following quote from the book:

"When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out-of-place."

Highly recommended...

I am always torn between recommending Mao II or White Noise to those who want to try some DeLillo. Perhaps one can consider Mao II to be a watered-down White Noise: its characters and events are fleshed out more, and it reads more like a novel than a collection of clever aphorisms.

Mao II lacks the "edginess" of White Noise, but at the same time, we should applaud DeLillo of not harping on the theme of "America is really consumerist" for ever and ever. A writer of his skill can take on more challenging themes than that.

So what's it about? It's about individuals and crowds, and the frightening equivalence between the lone-wolf individual and the composite of crowds. Think repeating Mao portrait. Think of the name of the reclusive, lone-wolf main character: Bill Gray. There's also stuff about art, and of course DeLillo's ubiquitous "novelists are terrorists" insinuations.

This is probably my second-favorite DeLillo, and the one I'd recommend to someone looking for something like a traditional novel. It was very enjoyable, although perhaps not as intellectually searing as something like White Noise or (Pynchon's) Lot 49.

For the mass wedding and the Ayatollah's burial procession passages alone, this book would be priceless. Still, there's much more on the spare prose of "Mao II" to make one thank God Don DeLillo exists. Best novel writer alive.