Editors Reads Verdict
DeLillo's most concentrated and intellectually precise novel poses the central question of postmodern cultural life: whether the novelist's claim to remake consciousness has been superseded by the terrorist's.
What We Loved
- The central thesis — writers and terrorists are competitors for the power to change how people see — is DeLillo at his most crystalline
- The opening Moonie mass wedding and the closing crowd scenes are among his most powerful set-pieces
- At 241 pages, it achieves its aims without the sprawl of his larger works
Minor Drawbacks
- The plot, such as it is, is largely a vehicle for DeLillo's thematic concerns rather than an independent narrative interest
- Bill Gray's reclusion makes him difficult to access as a character — DeLillo seems to like this difficulty more than some readers do
Key Takeaways
- → The crowd — whether religious, political, or commercial — is the defining image of late twentieth-century life
- → The novelist's traditional claim to influence culture has been taken over by the terrorist, the demagogue, and the image
- → Withdrawal from public visibility is itself a kind of image, a statement that accumulates its own crowd
- → The hostage is the emblem of the powerless individual in a world organized by mass forces
| Author | Don DeLillo |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin |
| Pages | 241 |
| Published | June 1, 1991 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Postmodern Fiction, American Literature |
Mao II Review
Don DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992, and the novel deserves the recognition not because it is his most immediately pleasurable work — it is not — but because it is his most intellectually precise. In 241 pages, DeLillo states and develops his central theme more directly than anywhere else in his fiction: the competition between the novelist and the terrorist for the power to alter human consciousness.
Bill Gray is a reclusive American novelist who has not published in decades, living under a false name with a small household of devotees — a situation unmistakably modeled on J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon — whose unpublished manuscript grows and is revised but never finished. His assistant, Scott, manages his isolation with the fanaticism of a cultist, literally worshipping the idea of the withdrawn literary giant. When a photographer named Brita Nilsson comes to photograph Gray — one of a series of portraits of writers she is compiling — the encounter disrupts the compound’s careful equilibrium and sets the novel’s thin plot in motion.
The plot involves Gray being recruited to read a statement on behalf of a Swiss-Maoist poet held hostage by a group in Beirut. It is not a thriller. DeLillo is uninterested in the mechanics of the hostage situation; he is interested in what the situation reveals about the novelist’s place in a media-saturated world. The novel’s thesis, stated explicitly by Bill Gray, is that the terrorist and the writer once competed for the same territory — the power to change how people see — but the competition is over: “What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The novel is breathing its last.” In a world organized by images, crowds, and spectacle, the patient, individual art of fiction has been superseded.
The opening section of Mao II — a mass Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium, depicted with DeLillo’s characteristic mix of fascination and dread — establishes the novel’s counter-image to the reclusive novelist: the crowd, the mass movement, the human aggregation that erases individual identity. The final section, in Beirut, offers a corresponding image of a city organized entirely by violence and faction. Between these two forms of collective annihilation, Bill Gray disappears — literally, in the plot, and figuratively, as the representative of a literary culture that has lost its claim on the public imagination. It is DeLillo’s bleakest and most honest assessment of his own vocation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Mao II" about?
Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist who has not published in decades, is drawn into a situation involving a poet held hostage by a terrorist group in Beirut. DeLillo's meditation on the relationship between writers and terrorists — both of whom claim the power to change how people see the world — is his most concentrated statement of his themes: the crowd, the image, the person who withdraws from visibility and the person who seeks it at any cost.
What are the key takeaways from "Mao II"?
The crowd — whether religious, political, or commercial — is the defining image of late twentieth-century life The novelist's traditional claim to influence culture has been taken over by the terrorist, the demagogue, and the image Withdrawal from public visibility is itself a kind of image, a statement that accumulates its own crowd The hostage is the emblem of the powerless individual in a world organized by mass forces
Is "Mao II" worth reading?
DeLillo's most concentrated and intellectually precise novel poses the central question of postmodern cultural life: whether the novelist's claim to remake consciousness has been superseded by the terrorist's.
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