Some people call this second tier Delillo, but there’s something about this that resonates with me. Something to do with apostasy and the reason people write. This has the classic Delillo diamond phrases. It might be my favorite one, actually. I will revise this in time.

What is the role of fiction writers in world peace? This might as well be the aching question that this book tried to answer. Or offered to answer. That, for me, is what made this book different from other books about novelists as the main protagonist. That, for me, is the reason why I really like this book.

This is my 3rd Don DeLillo and he is still to disappoint. This does not have the in-your-face sadness of his Falling Man (3 days) because it is not about 9/11 but this is not as artsy as the book that made me automatically buy a book whenever I see his name on the cover, The Body Artist (4 stars). There is no turning back. I will have to read all those 6 other DeLillo books that I have in my tbr shelf.

The story revolves around Bill Gray who is like Salinger, recluse and elusive. One day, he lets himself be photographed (like Salinger) it made him popular until he becomes involved as a spokesperson for a Swiss writer being held hostage in Beirut.

For me, my take on the story is this: novelists create dreams and this make them like "gods." Even if their works are not real, there are truths in them. Truths that are universal and timeless. That's why authors like Salinger or DeLillo (although he is not recluse really) are being read. With this impact on readers, they share a part in achieving something positive in this world. Because they speak to the hearts and minds of people, they are, in a way, maybe indirectly, responsible to common good like world peace.

This is a great book. My only small complaint is that DeLillo is fond of non-linear narration with frequent shifts on settings, time and characters. Had I not read "Falling Man" first I would not have enjoyed this as much as I did.

Thought provoking book. Intriguing characters especially Brita who is the photographer focusing on writers. She does not photograph other people except writers. What a novel idea.

I made a good decision welcoming 2015 with this book.

What the fuck even was that?!
I felt like I was being dragged around Bud Fox's apartment by Darien Taylor being shown the hottest contemporary art of... the late 80's - Holy Shit is this book dated
Aside from being 1/3 of a book with no plot (I will die on "Something Has to Actually Happen In Your Book" island, oh and "Your Characters' Actions Have to Make Sense" Island), Mao II was among the 5 most pretentiously written books I've read. I wonder if DeLillo actually thought that he was God, touring us around NYC. I frequently had to reread passages that I'd missed while my eyes were rolling back in my head
Underworld isn't perfect (seriously, cut the nun story line) but it's damn close and White Noise is almost great - Mao II was a disaster that felt like it was written as a stoned dorm room conversation by a DeLillo super fan

The premise: terrorists have taken the place of writers (specifically novelists) as shapers of the public consciousness. Timely subject, nearly fifteen years later. But it takes great skill to make a subject like this dull as dish water. But Delillo, unfortunately, succeeded in doing just this.

We have Bill, a reclusive novelist who has, after decades, allowed himself to be photographed. We have Brita, the photographer, who in my estimation should have been the focal point of the entire novel. And we have the hangers-on, Karen & Scott who reminded me of a couple hippie squatters, living off Bill’s building legacy.

Within a few pages of meeting him, Bill lived up to every stereotype you’d expect of the stereotypical reclusive writer. When Brita shows up to take his picture, it only take a couple minutes for Bill to get on his soapbox and spend the next ten pages ranting about how the novelist has lost all power - a power he believes they’ve held for over a thousand years. This seems to play into the long held postmodern belief about the death of the novel, that the novel is already dead. (Yet they continued to write.) The whole thing was terribly one dimensional.

After that I had no more use for Bill.

Then we have Scott and Karen. We’re introduced to Karen in the book’s opening scene via a mass wedding. A kind of Jonestown in reverse. Instead of everyone killing themselves in a half-believed religious ecstasy, Karen and five thousand of her fellow religious fanatics are married by a man who resembles a Korean Jim Jones. We’re introduced to Karen’s parent, see the bulk of the scene from their perspective, yet never hear from them again. This reminded of the ill-advised way late 1800s and early 1900s novelists began their stories with a this-here-is-real setup, a buncha folks sitting around a fire, spinning yarns, then never returning to see how the tales they were spinning affected them. Still, the mass wedding was amusing in a Jerry Springer (or Morton Downey Jr. kind of way). And that was as amusing as Karen and Scott were. Scott was forgettable, completely.

That leaves Brita, the photog. After her initial meeting with Bill, maybe 40 pages into the novel, we don’t hear from her again until the end. The one interesting character in the book.

The death of the novel, indeed.

This was as helpful to its death as a nail bomb. Quote Mark…

In a review of DeLillo's third novel, GREAT JONES STREET, which I wrote two days ago, I detailed in some depth the evolution of my relationship with the legendary New York author's work. I mentioned that the two DeLillos I read in high school during the mid-nineties were AMERICANA and WHITE NOISE. I certainly saw MAO II in bookstores, held it in my hands, considered it, almost certainly considering purchasing it. I am not sure why I didn't read it. It seems like something that would have appealed to me very much. I was a young, tormented dude obsessed with literature (19th century and postwar and anything promising to be especially brutal) who happened to have a print of one of Warhol's silkscreens of Mao hanging over his bed. With its fervid intensity, sense of a young writer taking breathless risks, its enmeshment it its cultural-historical moment, and its focus on avant-garde American cinematographic practices, AMERICANA appealed to me even more than did the widely-beloved WHITE NOISE with its virulent impassivity and disconcerting coldness, though I was very fond of it also. WHITE NOISE obviously remains a landmark achievement and testament to a major author launching into what we might call his mature phase. The earlier novels, AMERICANA and GREAT JONES STREET being the two that I have read, are pretty ferocious and bloody-minded, appealing to me very much, redolent as they are of encounters with unkempt men with a dangerous gleam in their eyes, probably high on speed. MAO II follows from WHITE NOISE and looks forward to UNDERWORLD, a novel it resembles in many ways: it starts out in a stadium, for one thing, and its accomplishments speak to a set of skills we might associate with architects, their grasp of functional units and composite design and so forth. It is symphonic in its constellations of theme and unambiguous in its self-presentation as a novel of ideas. The writing itself does not often strive to derange or transcend, sometimes even evoking for me the popular paperbacks I enjoyed as a younger kid, often reading like a high-minded thriller in which the characters indulge in uniquely elevated interchanges. What distinguishes it are the unfussy control of craft, the exemplary thematics, the formal dexterity, and its uncommon prescience. The brief bookend sections possess a quality of uncanny symmetry, drawing attention as the novel reaches termination to the precision of its formal and thematic achievements. In the opening section we are introduced to a mass spectacle, “the single floating eye of the crowd,” and the conglomerated bodies of followers of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, “immunized against the language of self.” The section ends with a blunt prophesy: “The future belongs to crowds.” It is a chilling line, but in a certain sense it now seems fundamentally erroneous. What the novel, published in 1991, fails to foresee is the way in which the internet would existentially isolate people though paradoxically rendering them hyper-connected. Or does it fail to see this? I suspect I will come back to this. The closing section, which mirrors the first most directly in a surprising and ingenious way I will leave prospective readers to discover for themselves, offers what I believe to be a far more salient prophesy corresponding to terrorism, disaster, and the crises of the Middle East. We are in war-torn Beirut, DeLillo discovering there a “millennial image mill.” Beirut as harbinger, indelibly, especially in hindsight. “The war is so fucking simple. It is the lunar part of us that dreams of wasted terrain. She hears their voices calling across the leveled city. Our only language is Beirut.” The bulk of the novel tells the story of Bill Gray, a reclusive author (invoking, of course, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, and, to an extent, DeLillo himself), his assistant Scott, a young woman named Karen, she of the crowd of anonymous Moonies, and a photographer named Brita who penetrates their isolationist sphere in order to collect photographic images of Bill as part of a project concerning writers. The theme of compromised self-fortification is shot through with anxious ambivalence about crowds and media events born of their devotional excesses. This concern with the individual in unsettled relation to the mass has always been at the heart of DeLillo, but what concerns his later works just as much is an obsession with history--the development of historical spirit in Hegelian terms--and human evolution. Indeed, it stands to reason that a book issuing prophesies regarding emergent societal modalities would be concerned in a more broader sense with the evolution of the species. The photographer Brita is touching on this when she speaks of her own need "to understand how we belong to the planet in a new way.” This theme became pronounced in POINT OMEGA, one of DeLillo's finest and certainly his most underrated novel. One of my favourite elements of POINT OMEGA was the implicit connection its drew between cognitive frontiers and Douglas Gordons' art project 24 HOUR PSYCHO. Not only does the earlier MAO II juxtapose the work of the novelist with that of the terrorist, it brings Andy Warhol into equation, going so far to name the book after one of the inscrutable pop artist's pieces, a sketch rather than a silkscreen of the author of that little red book of quotations. In MAO II, the novel and presumably the sketch, Andy's work reflects “the dissolvability of the artist and the exaltation of the public figure.” It is cumulatively imbued--not only those works concerned with repurposing photos of crime scenes and automobile accidents, but naturally Marilyn and Elvis and Mao, too, perhaps especially so--with “death glamour.” DeLillo sees something predatory, even cannibalistic, about the photographic image. Everybody knows, of course, that cameras steal your soul. A pair of beautiful DeLillo sentences, making that peculiar kind of music their author likes to make, even in his soberer and olderer iteration: “But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?” Then there are moving images of crowds, often in violent ecstasy. News. Our 24 Hour 21st Century Horrors Cycle. Crowds in which the individual has all but abnegated his or her identity. Dissolution into collective madness. Quoth Bill Gray, to whom the literary racket is being outmoded by cunning maniacs: “News of disaster is the only narrative people need.” No small amount of prophesy there, neither, is there? I would like to return the subtlety and finesse of this brawny little novel. I love the delicate twinings, the doublings, such as the novelist and the terrorist, Mao II and Coke II, Yankee Stadium and the Theatre of War. This is an eminently American novel and also explicitly a global one, hovering at times like a drone, on the scene, getting the story and the story and the story, the singular plurality of it all. What kind of man wrote this novel? He is a bit like Bill Gray, whose novels, according to his assistant Scott, function in such a way that "things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.” He is also a bit like Bill Gray in that he represents part of that set of phenomena I previously suggested he might have failed to prophesy: the existentially isolated man, compromised from without, hyper-connectivity assuring an endless, destabilizing bombardment, eminently bad juju, and the flood of dreadful intimations. It's not all bad. Anybody who reads DeLillo long and deep enough will be aware that this secretive man, who is after all still with us, has some workable grasp of the bottom line of spiritual self-care. Still: it's pretty bad. Who did the future end up belonging to? So far the individual lunatic gunman, off his fucking rocker high on impotent rage, is flourishing in ways the Arab Spring could not. Of course I would be an unimaginative little fool indeed if I thought I could rule out the possibility that the crowds will yet have their day.

I was tempted to give this modernist novel just one star.

Why two stars, then?

The prologue about the mass wedding set at Yankee Stadium was an interesting hook. I hoped Mao II by Don DeLillo would revolve around Karen's father, Rodge, as he "saves" his daughter from the Unification Church. But apparently, it didn't. Events unfurled mostly from the perspectives of Bill, Scott, Karen (Rodge's daughter) and Brita. I also learned about the Unification Church (known to some as Moonies). Oh, and the self-proclaimed anti-satanist Reverand Sun Myung Moon makes a brief appearance.

The book follows Bill, photographed by a foreign photographer Brita Nelson who is developing a series of photos of writers who attempt to maintain privacy. Bill is having a crisis. He is losing confidence in his work as a novelist and faith in writers believing they can no longer have a cultural impact. It also features a revolving bar in New York. I scratched my head a bit there...

The literal style of the book was complicated yet absorbing. But the poetic dialogue between Bill and Brita put me off, especially Bill's tantrum the morning after. I laughed out loud at the exchange. In one moment, Bill delivers a poetic speech about culture and then loses it at the dinner table. I certainly couldn't understand the enigmatic Scott.

You gathered that I didn't like the characters or the ending much. Establishing characters (in a story) is far more interesting than poetic exchanges about culture between so-called "lovers" who have just met. And I think the novel lacked an exciting lead. Bill is only there to deliver the philosophical message about modernism. He's only there to nourish the mystery of a writer. He has lost all drive and purpose. Lastly, I didn't quite like how things concluded in Beirut.

Mao II was depressing. I have never zoned out as much as I have here. Yet, the novel is beloved by many people who I respect. I will not try to hinder readers from accessing or reading this book. I dare say you should read it at least once. I might someday return to this book if I discover a DeLillo novel I like. The next one will be Libra.

Verdict: 2/5

I wanted to enjoy this book. However, I felt like an inexperienced farmer ploughing a large field.

06/08/2023

I love DeLillo, but I wasn’t blown away by this novel. I was intrigued with how it started out, and loved it on the sentence level, but it ultimately fell flat. Here are some the sentences that jumped out to me, that gave me the hope that the narrative would sustain me:

“The future belongs to crowds."
"In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won't show his face is encroaching on holy turf."
"[A] curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape & influence."
"News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative.”
"The withheld work of art is the only eloquence left."
"Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad."
"Does writing come out of bitterness and rage or does it produce bitterness and rage?"
"It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands."
"It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect."
"He'd sit aboard a ghostly flight with six or seven tense Beirutis, refugees in reverse, going home to terror on every level."
"He is saying as long as there is a Western presence it is a threat to self-respect, to identity."

I do think that the current political climate perhaps led to my mixed feelings about it -- it’s hard to read a book these days which touches on terrorism if the book was written prior to 9-11 (this was a decade earlier). A sentence from chapter 10 illustrates well my thoughts: "Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror." It’s hard for this story to absorb my terror (and especially the terror of my friends who are among the targeted and marginalized communities) when the actual horrors of today play out day-by-day, in ways that shock me more than the novel. When the Trump administration makes a DeLillo novel seem, well, not so much hopeful as much as a preferable reality, you know we are in a bad place indeed.

Coming up on the 25th anniversary of its original publication, Don DeLillo's Mao II continues to be relevant and compelling for any reader interested in the state of the novel in a time of terrorism. It recounts the progress of fictive novelist Bill Gray from carefully-preserved isolation to personal exposure in a hasty attempt at political engagement. Bill undertakes his risky journey in part as a response to his perception that the novel has lost its power to influence human consciousness on a large scale, and that the novelist has ceded his role as a shaper of hearts and minds to the terrorist. Although he is mostly alone in this belief, he acts on it, or tries to, in a way that seems intended to take the measure of its truth or falsity.

In literary circles and, we are meant to understand, within the greater culture, Bill Gray is celebrated for two novels he wrote many years ago. We hear almost nothing about these books, which the other characters (although not the terrorists) have read and consider influential, memorable, and important, and more about the novel Bill has been writing and re-writing for what seems to be something like 20 years. The new book is disappointing to the two people who've read it: Bill himself and his personal assistant, Scott Martineau. Scott judges it to fall "woefully short" and advises against its publication. Brita Nilsson, the photojournalist who visits Bill's house by unprecedented invitation to take photographs of the legendary reclusive writer, argues for an end to the incessant and superfluous rewriting: publish and move on. Charles Everson, Bill's friend and editor, wants the book sight unseen -- unsurprisingly, as Everson is a publishing professional and always in need of some writer's work to sell, especially the long-awaited new novel from a long-silent famous author. Bill himself is coy about his intention; his assertion that he's going to publish the novel seems not quite genuine and more a means of teasing and tormenting Scott, on whom he depends and whom he seems to love and hate in roughly equal and alternating parts. He, too, however, considers the new novel a failure and describes it in terms of grotesque anthropomorphic deformity.

If writing a great novel, or even just a good one, depends in part on confidence (as well as a minimal level of sobriety, to say nothing of talent, which is ineffable), we can conclude that Bill has lost an essential quotient of confidence (and seems again to be drinking a bit too much for competent sentence-making). The narrative does not state, however, if Bill's compositional troubles have been caused by his theory that the novel has ceased to matter, or if his self-awareness of being a novelist in steep decline has encouraged him to think that, well, writing is of little consequence, anyway: people don't take the novel seriously anymore and few people are reading at all. Cause and effect here seem blended, coterminous and mutually reinforcing. The important point -- for Bill Gray, for making sense of DeLillo's novel -- is that Bill believes the novelist is losing his "zero-sum" struggle with the terrorist to serve as an individual with a capability to create meaning and affect our collective consciousness. He articulates this notion unambiguously in conversation with George Haddad a bit past the novel's half-way point: "Becket is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative." Having witnessed terrorist spectacles much too often since 1991, one hardly needs to note the immanent prescience of these lines.

To counter the angst of cultural irrelevance, Bill edges himself out of hiding: first by inviting Brita to photograph him, then by allowing himself to be drawn into an effort, led initially by Charlie Everson, to free a Swiss poet held hostage by an unnamed terrorist group in Beruit. Circumstances conspire against success; in London, a bomb explodes and Bill and Charlie are nearly killed. Complications follow, especially Bill's distrust that Charlie's motive in enmeshing him in the humanitarian effort has as much to do with returning Bill to the public eye and publishing his new novel as it does with saving the poet. Convinced that a fresh approach is necessary -- or persuaded of this assumption by the shady and inscrutable George Haddad, semi-official spokesman for the hostage-takers -- Bill journeys farther east in a misconceived and inept attempt to meet the terrorist leader Abu Rashid face-to-face. He is aware that he is risking his life and yet, lacking another way to live meaningfully, he continues Beruit-ward as if seeking both redemption and destruction.

Bill Gray's fatal pilgrimage eastward plays out to a chatter of political theory and purported spiritual enlightenment, the former given voice by George Haddad and the latter parroted by Karen Janney. With nothing else in common -- they never meet, are never on the same continent -- George and Karen separately demonstrate two ways in which "The future belongs to crowds." For Haddad, the "crowd" is a group identification based on political interest and expediency. Unified, speaking with one voice and acting from a common array of values, this authentic Lebanese identity -- "without the Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis, without the Iranian volunteers, the religious wars" -- will eject the cultural influence and political presumptions of Western democracies and re-assert autonomy. According to Haddad, significant transformative action by Lebanese on an individual basis is impossible. His consciousness-altering touchstone is Mao and the Chairman's Little Red Book of Quotations:

In China the narrative belonged to Mao. People memorized it and recited it to assert the destiny of their revolution. So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by outside forces. It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people. The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don't you see the beauty in this?

Bill Gray, disenfranchised novelist, does not see the beauty. A slight book of simplistic aphorisms has displaced the novel as the form of literary expression most capable of exerting influence on a culture. Tellingly, George Haddad mentions no Lebanese equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book to shape and guide the journey of the Lebanese people as they pursue their common path to communal actualization -- what Marx might have called species-freedom.

Karen, a refugee from the evangelistic, proselytizing (and totalitarian) Moonies, continues to believe that ego-driven desire must be expunged in preparation for God on Earth. With "Master's total voice ready in her head," Karen performs an ad hoc ministry among the homeless in New York City, where she is ostensibly searching for AWOL Bill. Variants of terrorism -- the Chinese Army routing the Chinese people in Tiananmen Square; horrific riots of True Believers disrupting the burial of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- are viewable as television spectacles but do not alter Karen's belief that complete religious commitment and a state of ecstatic selflessness are essential to being sealed for salvation. Perhaps she views the chaos and destruction wrought by crowds as a phase necessary to preparing a place for the Kingdom of God. At a certain point, however, Karen seems to weary of her evangelical mission and returns to Bill's house, where Scott awaits -- cleaning Bill's typewriter, organizing readers' letters, making lists to aid in the ongoing effort to restore order from domestic chaos.

The spaces and lives Don DeLillo depicts in Mao II provide little in the way of comfort and reassurance, as these attitudes are conventionally figured in the bourgeois Anglo-American novel. And yet, the Moonie mass wedding ceremony in Yankee Stadium that opens the book is balanced in its closing scene by a small wedding party incongruously en promenade -- accompanied by a tank! -- through the broken streets of Beruit. Even in a chaotic world whipped into frenzy by violent actings-out of competing groups, significant action on an individual basis is possible, perhaps, if individuals have enough courage and resolution to commit to each other and follow-through. The anonymous bride and groom whom Brita observes from her balcony have succeeded, at least for the time being, in performing a significant act based on individual preference. Presumably, they are not anonymous to each other, only to Brita (and to us). Conversely, Bill Gray dies anonymously in pursuit of personal redemption by serving a cause apart from, and arguably greater than, himself. The contradictions of these disparate endings is not an accident; like all of DeLillo's novels, Mao II is a disquieting piece of narrative fiction because it leaves its complexities unresolved. As Karen's daddy intimates early on, searching for his daughter amid a vast blue-and-white mass of "eternal boy-girl," the old assurances don't always apply.

Jokin DeLillon kirjoitustyylissä iskee minuun täysillä. Yhteiskunnallinen kommenttiraita yhtyy arkiseen kuvaukseen ja poliittisiin ja uskonnollisiin teemoihin. Tunnelma oli hyvin samankaltainen kuin aiemmin lukemassani Valkoisessa kohinassa. Olen hämmentynyt mutta vaikuttunut.

Read it when something horrible happens.

Sobre el terrorismo en la era postmoderna. De los mejores del autor.

This was my third time through this book and I read it this time as part of my ongoing Delillo re-readathon where I am reading all his books in publication order. I wrote a fair amount last time I read it (almost exactly 3 years ago - see below). So, just a quote from the NY Times to add:

"If terrorists have seized control of the world narrative, if they have captured the historical imagination, have they become, in effect, the world's new novelists? For sheer influence over the human mind, have they displaced a precariously placed literature? Are writers -- lacking some greater if lethal faith -- the new hostages? "Is history possible? Is anyone serious?" These are some of the questions posed by "Mao II," the latest novel by Don DeLillo, who has already proved with such books as "Players," "White Noise" and "Libra" that no one can match his ability to let America, the bad dream of it, speak through his pen."

(Obviously this was written some time ago and Mao II is no longer "the latest novel by Don Delillo").

---------------
ORIGINAL REVIEW
---------------
This novel is just about ideal for me as its themes combine photography (and the power of the image) with writing (and the role of the novelist). About 90% of my time is spent either taking photographs or reading.

The title of the book is derived from Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Mao Zedong, but the power of the image, especially of a portrait, is a dominant part of the story and it isn’t just Mao II that is discussed. Alongside images and novelists, the book also explores terrorism and crowds. There are probably other themes you could pull out, but those seem to be the main ones.

Bill Gray is a reclusive writer with two significant novels under his belt. For reasons that are explored through the course of the book, he has never finished his next book: he has withdrawn and hidden himself away (think Thomas Pynchon without the output, or even, to a lesser extent, Delillo himself). He allows a photographer to come to him to capture his portrait, partly driven by the realisation that his seclusion has become a kind of captivity. He is looking for a way to escape. As events pan out, he visits New York and finds himself agreeing to travel to London to give a poetry reading on behalf of a writer held captive in Beirut. This offers him a chance to do what he may or may not have been planning all along: disappear completely.

There are other people involved in the story, but it is a limited cast. In an incomplete list, other than Gray and the photographer, Brita, there is Gray's assistant, Scott, and there is Karen. The opening pages of the book, a preface, describe a mass wedding in a baseball stadium organised by the Unification Church and presided over by Sun Myung Moon. Here is where we meet Karen as she is married to a Korean man she has just met and who was picked out for her by Moon. But, by the time the book starts properly, they are in separate countries and she is with Scott. This is one of several plot developments that Delillo does not explicitly describe until well after they have happened: the reader is left to work it out and then see the details emerge as the novel progresses.

What the mass wedding in the preface does is introduce us to the idea of crowds which is a repeating motif through the book as Delillo contrasts crowds and individuals (Gray is a novelist looking to reach a mass audience - perhaps, but we take time to explore Mao Zedong and Ayatollah Khomeini as well as Sun Myung Moon).

"The future belongs to crowds."

And

"The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don’t you see the beauty in this? Isn’t there beauty and power in the repetition of certain words and phrases? You go into a room to read a book. These people came out of their rooms. They became a book-waving crowd. Mao said, 'Our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.' And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd."

Crowds are effectively contrasted with Gray's determination to disappear, to become more and more isolated.

Crowds are also the targets of terrorists. It is an ongoing theme in Delillo’s novels to compare the roles of novelists and terrorists. Here we read:

"Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

And

"'For some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game.'
'Interesting. How so?'
'What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.'
'And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.'"

Mao II was first published in 1991, but it makes a fascinating read from the other side of events like 9/11: at times it seems almost prophetic when read 25+ years later. Coincidentally, it was written around the time when Salman Rushdie was condemned by Ayatollah Khomeini. Delillo has said the book is not about Rushdie, but he has acknowledged the connection.

Without doubt, this is a stylised book. No one writes dialogue like Delillo writes dialogue (only Delillo could write in the middle of a conversation "Bill laughed in a certain way" and the reader know what he means) and the story seems deliberately set up to allow Delillo to explore some of these big themes. For me, it is not an emotional book, but it is one that you have to admire and which manages to be engaging despite its lack of emotion.

Just as an aside, I couldn’t help but notice this quote:

"If they could send a woman wearing stockings who might whisper the word “stockings.” This would help him live another week."

and compare it with this from Delillo's earlier work The Names:

"'Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered … Use names,' I said."

The image as a way to bridge the gap between public and private, the contrast of crowds vs. individuals, the role of novelists compared with terrorists, the effect on a novel of its release into the public domain. A fascinating book to read even if, or perhaps because, the world has changed in the 27 years since its publication.