Mao II, published in 1991, is a prescient novel in that it captures the essence of media driven terror as we know it today, 2016, with thematic riffs on Mao, Andy Warhol, Lebanon, and Iran. One could almost say that it confirms the notion that the arts anticipate history better than social scientists.

Here we encounter a novelist, Bill, who is a Salinger-like recluse and the focal point of two caretakers and a visiting photographer. One of his caretakers, Karen, has married but not consummated her relationship with a fellow named Kim, as arranged by the Reverend Moon. Scott, her rescuer and lover, is fanatically devoted to Bill's habits and needs with nothing less than a Moonie's passion. Brita, the photographer, is just into writers, taking pictures of them, with no assumption that her photos will gain an audience, in this case because she has promised Bill they won't be made public.

Bill apparently has published two important novels and is polishing a third, over and over again. He has no apparent interest in publishing it, or in making himself a public figure, but through the maneuvers of an editor, finds himself involved in trying to gain the freedom of a French poet being held by a man named Rashid in Beirut.

Got that?

Okay, thematically, the point is that the images of modern life are as shallow as a Warhol and last as long as toilet paper in a public bathroom. So we can go anywhere--from a New York gallery to a farmhouse somewhere to London to Cyprus to Beirut or Teheran--and it's all the same media-goop wherever we are.

This is DeLillo's familiar riff, sometimes lightened by the suggestion of a conspiracy but generally just heavy on meaninglessness.

Now comes the good question: How does he achieve a fairly compelling effect with his stick figures and slick nihilism?

The answer perhaps lies in the dedication of this novel--to Gordon Lish. Gordon Lish was a very influential editor in the 1980s and 1990s who knew how to really work the formula "less is more." His most brilliant (and upset) student was Raymond Carver, whom Lish made a successful minimalist against his will. Lish would unerringly (it seems to me) cut to the chase for Carver and give him edited versions of his work that were better than what he knew how to write. Carver appreciated and hated this. He begged Lish to let him be himself. But Lish wasn't having it. And eventually Carver died after forcing some stuff into print that was less well written than what Lish, the editor, would have permitted.

Anyway, it would seem that somehow DeLillo also fell under Lish's influence because through expert reductionism Mao II and many other DeLillo books hang together by virtue of an exciting, highly targeted, but enigmatic tone that is pure Lish.

The secret here is 1) obsession, 2) specificity, 3) indifference to the cavalcade of details, acutely observed, that create the Theater of Nothing that is a New York gallery, or a farmhouse, or London, or Beirut. Wherever you go in this novel, it's all wonderfully concrete and pointless.

Now, back to whether this 25-year-old novel foresaw the future. Well, not really. Terror as we know it began somewhere in the 1970s. By 1991 we had seen a lot of it. Maybe not ISIS scale, but the blood ran in airports, the Olympics, cruise ships, and, of course, Beirut. Osama bin Laden did not invent terror. The Bader Meinhof gang had a hand in that, the PLO had a hand in that, Black September had a hand in that. Never heard of them? Okay, but they did, and that's what DeLillo was writing about and that's what we're still experiencing--furious, futile tragedies going nowhere but not leaving the scene, either.

The issues one might take with Mao II, while acknowledging that it's a gripping and arresting novel, are twofold. First, given the seductive uniformity of its dry, photographic detail and controlled characterization, Mao II doesn't really need to have an integrated plot and literary folks like DeLillo and Lish probably would object that an integrated plot is the ultimate fiction. Second, the stylish portrayal of a novelist eagerly accepting death in Beirut is Warholesque but unrealistic. Even suicides, perhaps especially suicides, die in desperate awareness of their failure to keep on living. Death may be narrated as a cool, clean event, but it's not a mere incident; whether we are a crowd put to death or an individual sacrificing his own life, it's not nothing, in other words.

In literary terms, the problem is that when you make your prose beautifully formulaic, you risk doing the same thing to your story. If your point is that the world is such that no one cares about what happens to anyone, okay, point taken. But people do care, and minimalist writing beggars reality, which is much richer in fear and anguish and desire and uncertainty than a beautifully reductionist text conveys.

Mao II both starts and ends with a marriage. The novel closes with a festive marriage in Beirut, flanked by a war tank in a city torn apart, and opens with a mass marriage in Yankee Stadium, one that reminded me of the magnificent beginning of Underworld, DeLillo’s torrential tour de force. In the latter, baseball is often portrayed as a pillar of American culture, but here the focus is on the multitude. Crowds are everywhere in Mao II, and their gestalt particularly interests both the author and the main character of the novel. “The future belongs to the crowds”, prophesizes the last sentence of the first part.

An abrupt shift brings us to the core of the novel – Bill Gray, an ageing writer, has found peace in reclusion but struggles with an unfinished novel, supposedly his last. He lives in an undisclosed location with Scott, an ex-fan, and Karen, who took part in the mass marriage many years before and ended up fleeing from the cult. They cross paths with Brita, that Bill hired to photograph her after many years of seclusion.

Bill is a fading star, a writer who might have lost his voice. There is a hint at his egotistical presence here and there, but his intentions are not always clear. Yet, he is an invaluable vehicle for the novel, as the main themes and actions gravitate around him.

Like in most DeLillo novels, plot is secondary to ideas and ambiance. However, I found this to be almost entirely a novel full of ideas and philosophy, rather than one build around them. The non sequitur is present in the most perplexing ways, and characters interact in an uncanny fashion. They navigate a alienated inconsequence space that for me characterizes most of the author’s work. Characters as mere spectators of the roaring crowds, the billboards on the street, the political turbulence.

The name Mao II is borrowed from an Andy Warhol serigraphy of the features of the Chinese Marxist leader. Maoism becomes a relevant topic later in the book, but many parallels are drawn before we reach that stage. The face of Mao stands for a cause, an intention. Bill Gray’s photographs, which he aimlessly gets done, do the same. Or they should.
Throughout the novel, he worries that writers are obsolete, that they have been replaced by terrorist leaders in instilling fear and change in society. He wished he belonged to an older generation of writers, those who were bound to make a difference. But now, society is ruled by mass media and sudden outbursts of terror. His ideas are no longer heard.

And that is why, halfway through the book, Bill Gray abandons his voluntary reclusion and departs first to London, to take part in the reading of a Swiss poet that was taken hostage by a Maoist Lebanese group, and then to Beirut, trying to make a difference and gradually getting closer to terrorism himself.

Written before the surge of Bin Laden and 9/11, Mao II is an incredibly prescient novel, and one written with the narrative brilliance of DeLillo’s best work.

Mao II—its title coming from one of Andy Warhol's famous portraits of Mao Zedong, opens in Yankee Stadium with a mass wedding of 13,000, and closes with a single wedding taking place in the early hours of the morning in Beirut; with a tank being part of the procession. And what is one of the things most associated with weddings?—photos, of course. Images. In DeLillo's tenth novel the Warhol pictures marry the ideas of image-making and totalitarianism, persuading speculation about how fame is transformed into a death mask, and how a portrait can somehow freeze the mind behind the face. Bill Gray, the reclusive writer who has enough royalties to now exist in obscurity, lives somewhere in upstate New York, with his younger assistant Scott; a kind of alter-ego, who happily attends to all his needs, and helps to maintains the massive Gray archive; including the much rewritten unpublished work. Not too sure whether to publish again, Gray derides to give the world an image instead of a book, and poses for the Swedish photographer Brita, whom Scott ushers to Gray's hideaway with all the caution of visiting an elusive terrorist. And that's kind of the point. Gray has retreated into silence and created a sort of myth status for himself, but only the terrorist has the real power these days—the ability to shape and influence actual events. The writer sees only one other choice besides seclusion—he can, like Andy Warhol, feed our addiction through imagery. Ironically, through terrorism itself, he is soon called into the real world to show support for a writer being held hostage in Lebanon, and after giving a public reading of his work in London, DeLillo delves into a murkier plot, which propels Gray to head off to Beirut, via Athens, where he ends up getting a deadly liver ailment due to a hit-and-run, before disappearing in an image of total anonymity. The novel isn't solely about Bill Gray; as Scott, his girlfriend Karen, and literary photographer Brita, get their own segments in the novel too, which gives the novel a wider canvas.
I found this to be quite a dark cautionary piece of storytelling, that moves from one serious idea to the next. But, I did feel it was told with a sense of humor also—a satirical eye, and anyone familiar with some of DeLillo's other novels would easily pick up on that. Mao II is filled with set pieces that do show off his great skill for a scene, and with multiple points of view. Also, the dialogue feels so genuine that reader is like a fly on the wall. Overall, he is just a brilliant storyteller. However, for those who like to be pulled emotionally by their fiction, DeLillo is seldom an emotional writer when it comes to characters. I wasn't expecting Mao II to be moving in anyway—and it wasn't, really. Despite the PEN/Faulkner Award, I believe this is such an underrated novel. I was so impressed by Mao II that I'm struggling to think of a reason not to give it top marks. I'd say it sits just behind Libra, Underworld and White Noise as his fourth best novel. DeLillo might be past his prime now, but for me, he is still the greatest living American writer out there.

This book is easily one of my favourite from DeLillo’s oeuvre, the prose is on point, the ideas are thick and fast and genuinely interesting and DeLillo doesn’t drag it out too long. I’ve always felt he works best in the somewhat shorter form, the 150-400 page range, something like Underworld just didn’t work for me, there were a few sections I enjoyed but the book suffered from an undercooked and soggy middle, but in Mao II Don’s prose never wavers and he gets out just in time before the whole thing burns away.

In the dust-jacket’s blurb it says the story is an intimate story about faith, longing, and redemption. I didn’t feel a sense of redemption about this book, or even much of a discussion about faith or longing. There are overt themes about the nature of art and the artist’s role in a society “reduced to blur and glut”, the isolated nature of the artist, and whether art is mere entertainment or something deeper and more profound. DeLillo has crammed a lot in here, there are multiple POV’s where all these themes and questions are streamed through and I think for the most part it works, DeLillo’s prose rarely drops a beat and the whole time you’re aware you’re in the hands of a master at the top of his game, and even though the plot is a mostly failure I’d rather read a beautiful failure like this than just about anything that gets lauded nowadays.

The opening section is worth the price of entry alone, a brilliant account of a mass Moonie wedding which is then followed by the young bride’s (Karen’s) nascent religious journey through tough urban streets. This idea of giving yourself away to something and self-sacrifice is obviously brought up early in the book and runs throughout it in various contexts. And I do think that the idea of faith to an ideal, whether it be art or some wider political struggle, is one of the stronger elements of the book and one of the more interesting concepts it wrestles with.

Of course you don’t read DeLillo for the plot but as I mentioned before the plot really doesn’t go anywhere, the whole thing just falls apart and DeLillo is left awkwardly tying bows, as in the end Bill Gray dies somewhat peacefully and abruptly, the poet held by the terrorist cell essentially disappears and is rumoured to be changing hands across various organisations, the photographer Brita moves on to documenting terrorist leaders and the books ends as it started with the scene of a wedding.

The way they live in the shadows, live willingly with death. The way they hate many of the things you hate. Their discipline and cunning. The coherence of their lives. The way they excite, they excite admiration. In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There’s too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him.

Throughout DeLillo’s career he seems to have had a fascination with the terrorist outsider, that Beeb documentary he did was largely about the questions raised in this book and also Libra, and his work post-Libra seems dotted here or there with terrorist acts and a particular curiosity with the media’s portrayal of these acts and the cultural significance of these atrocities – the parallels between these preoccupations and his fascination with death are also worth noting.

In some ways DeLillo’s take of the terrorist as the outsider and not assimilated by culture seems kind of dated now with the rise of the religious fundamentalist terrorist in culture in recent years, particularly in mainstream media culture where the terrorist, while still horrific, is almost a caricature and more a political tool than some fascinating martyr.

Obviously the terrorist’s acts are still outside the cultural ideals of The West and this gives them their power “terror is the only meaningful act”, and I guess art in this regard is somewhat impotent in the face of what the terrorist can do and how they can come to dominate culture, and there is little doubt that the terrorist “dominates the rush of endless streaming images” as DeLillo describes, but indiscriminate murder will always have a degree of shock and power regardless of how it’s framed. The novel seems to bask in this self-deprecation and this is its weakness, DeLillo doesn’t seem to make a case for art and how much it has over terrorism – just to add to this train of thought, the German composer Stockhausen famously suggested that the attacks of 9/11 were the greatest work of art ever made and that art couldn’t touch them in terms of magnitude and impact (remarks that he later retracted).

Art moves in ways beyond simply horror or bafflement or even awe, the fact that art manages to move and stun and change you without relying on the nefarious tactics of terror is what makes it art and not just barbarism or some grave use of force. Art has a dignity and grace and humanity terror doesn’t have, this is art’s power.

Images, both static and moving have been a recurrent motif with Don DeLillo. (In many of his works you have a character seeing the grainy images on TV with the volume turned down in a dark room) .In 'Mao II', he combines them with the themes of cults, crowds and creates a disturbing and unsettling work. Bill Gray, author of 2 acclaimed books has been living as a recluse for the last 20 odd years. Working on a uncompleted novel the whole time, never satisfied with his output, living in a secluded place in anonymity, a place haunted by words, Bill himself is possessed by words that occupy his entire existence but seem to elude him the more he tries to grasp them to make sense of his novel and indeed his life. One of his pet peeves about the position of novelists in society is
"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists.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."
Living with him are Scott his assistant who was a restless wanderer until he read Bill's works and managed to track him down and Karen, a former member of a religious cult, now deprogrammed. All 3 of them are restless in their own way and have formed a curious bond that enables them to live together in anonymity. This spell is broken when Brita a photographer whose mission to photograph as much writers as possible, is allowed to take photos of Bill. During the photo session she passes on a message from Bill's old friend which sets of a train of events which results in the unraveling of their lives, including Brita.

DeLillo's works are as much about ideas as they are about the characters and their motivations, indeed in some cases the ideas are what drive the novel. Here he brings together visuals, crowds and cults which may seem disparate at first glance but are actually linked closely together. When one talks of cult whether it is religious, terrorists, or sports based, they are all recognized by a leader. What better way to imprint the leader into the consciousnesses of the cult members other than photos or television images. Once the images are imprinted, the cult swells and becomes a crowd and there is a loss of individualism.

DeLillo shows us searing images of huge crowds, whether it be in the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, or at Tienanmen square, the mass wedding in the prologue or the thousands of homeless at a park that Karen sees each of them has the power to shift our perspectives. An to prove the power of visuals, the crowds at the Khomeini funeral and Tienanmen square are see in the television, but they still have the power to move you and as Karen wonders

"..if millions watched, if these millions matched the number on the Iranian plain, doesn't it mean we share something with the mourners, know an anguish, feel something pass between us, hear the sigh of some historic grief?"

These words published in 1992, makes even more sense now when we feel a pain shared with the mourners of school shooting thousands of miles away from where we are.

In novels like these where ideas play a predominant role, it is easy for the novelist to go overboard and the entire book and it's characters to become a playground for his rants and pet peeves, but Delillo avoids these pitfalls. Make no mistake, you can sense his voice throughout his novel, but not in a way that puts you off the book and that's because he gives his characters enough emotional heft to be visible to us and make us feel for them as much as we feel for their (Delillo) ideas. Whether it be the restlessness of Bill, his anger at the downgrading of the importance of novelists (as he sees it), his doubts about own work, afraid where the work is leading him to are all as important as his ideas. Like when Bill feels
"He had a foreboding, the little clinging tightness in the throat that he knew so well from his work, the times he was afraid and hemmed in by doubt, knowing there was something up ahead he didn't want to face, a character, a life he thought he could not handle."

we get an idea of the fear that a writer feels when he thinks that the book or a character is getting away from his control and taking a life of it's own, wanting to live on it's own terms rather than that of the creator. And when Bill goes off on a dangerous attempt into a hostage situation it makes sense in view of his earlier comparison about novelists and terrorists and hence it doesn't come across as something that has been put in the book just for effect. Similarly we empathize and understand (or try to) Scott binding himself with Bill, his obsession with organizing everything to make Bill's work as easy as possible so that he can concentrate on his writing alone. That's why when Scott stays alone in their house after Bill and Karen leave, working on meaningless organization of the house and papers is as poignant as the experiences of Karen where there is a whole chapter devoted to the homeless community living in a New York park, a multitude of crowds living in destitute, an old lady even living under plastic covers.

DeLillo's writing is nuanced and it's not just the imagery that he conjures that takes our breath. He can also take a mostly ignored fleeting moment and give it a concrete form, like when Bill is waiting for Brita and Scott to come, the house is completely silent and

"When they got out and walked to the porch steps he went to the door of his workroom and listened to them stamp their feet on the mat and come in downstairs, mingled voices, the ruffle of people entering a house, shaking of coats, making all the incidental noises of transition, the sigh of the full body, homeyness and deep relief, the way it seemed a danger and a lie."

All of us have experienced this moment, when we open the door and enter a silent house, the murmur of voices and the manner in which the house seems to wake up after a deep slumber. But it takes a DeLillo to point it out to us. A line or a phrase to elevate a thought and realms that we never thought was possible or even existed. Take what Britta says about New York

"Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space."

Now this is a standard line where one points out the inequality in society. I am not disputing the validity of the statement but it's something most people could write. Now read the same paragraph with the line that follows.

"Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. "

The last line throws a googly at a us and creates a seeming paradox. Theoretically there is space everywhere, it is infinite and we occupy space, but DeLillo says that all the space is inside. Which is true when we take space to only refer to a standard human habitat suitable for living and not 'space' as a concept. From that point of view, we see that millions are homeless (i.e) without space while the space for living is all inside the homes.

The novel ends with Brita travelling to Beirut to take picture of Rashid, a revolutionary leader there, but it's like the novel is starting again. Rashid a leader of people (cult, crowds) is to be photographed (maybe after a long time just like Bill) and this photo would perpetuate and imprint his memory into the minds of his followers (cult, crowds), even if he is no more. This novel requires your patience, to make sense of the imagery, the characters, the prose which is subtle enough to be ignored if we are distracted for even a bit. At no point does the novel opens up to us from the readability point of view, there is no concession given to us and we have to be relentless in forging ahead keeping our eyes (and ears) open for what DeLillo will tell us next. This is not your ideal first DeLillo book, that would be Americana. This book is to read when you have an idea of his works and motifs so you have an idea of what to expect.

More than any other author who comes to mind, DeLillo seems to be the one modern readers are the most conflicted over. Glancing through the reviews of this book from the GR users whom I follow, there are many "I loved/hated [this DeLillo book] but hated/loved [this other DeLillo book]" and many other "DeLillo is my favorite author whom I would never recommend to anyone else"-type comments.

It's curious. But I found myself without an explanation for why I was undertaking my third DeLillo book this year despite having had only mixed impressions of the first two. And these were not short books--Underwold clocks in at over 800 pages, while Libra is 500+. Granted, Mao II is much shorter and I finished it on bookended weekend bus trips from NYC to Philadelphia, but I have dozens of other books awaiting me in my room from authors who only exist in my mind as unblemished potential. So why persist with DeLillo?

I had a suspicion about this book: the things that I didn't love about DeLillo in his longer works (too many characters tenuously sketched, difficult plot development, rambling stories and anecdotes) would likely be precluded by necessity in a shorter book. Unfortunately, I was wrong. In fact, I think it must be DeLillo's style, regardless of the length of the work. He's like one of those pendulums you see in museums, with a pencil attached to the bottom: he swings in wide arcs and soars in dubiously related tangents but every once in a while deigns to add to the plot he is continuously teasing us with by scratching a bold stroke right through the story's center. It can be frustrating but also very rewarding. His books are sprawling and betray a numinous imagination, an unsurpassed talent for developing unique perspectives and dialogues and vernaculars, all leavened with a healthy shot of good old fashioned Americana.

And throughout it all, it's unmistakable that he is a gifted writer. There are passages in DeLillo that you have to watch out for (lest you miss them amongst the gratuitous perambulating) that will leave you gobsmacked. Mao II was so loosely constructed and its characters underdeveloped that I really did not enjoy it. It makes three DeLillo books/1500+ DeLillo pages with an average of fewer than three stars. But there is no way it will be the last of his works that I read.

I had pretty high expectations before starting it, as I have seen some extremely appreciative articles about him and his books. I expected a novel in the style of contemporary realism. Instead I got a novel full of interminable descriptions, lack of actual events and also centered on characters thoughts. Just the type of literature that I don't like.

The premise is hard to find. DeLillo probably wanted to write this novel in order to draw attention to several events from contemporary history that are unrelated. Taken together, the author thought that they may stand up for something, but I was unable to understand what was that. Especially as the characters seem not to be affected in any way by these events. This is why I will give it a 1.

Regarding the form, I liked three descriptions: the opening scene of a mass marriage of several thousands people from a religious group held on Yankee Stadium, the scenes from Beirut during Lebanese Civil War and the Tienanmen protests. But the rest of the novel was not at all interesting for me. Especially the dialogues were extremely poor as all characters spoke alike and it was pretty hard to follow it. I will rate it with another 1 for form, as I cannot ignore the important flaws for the sake of the couple good written pages.

In terms of originality, without being totally new, I believe the novel was pretty original, in terms of the 3 main events described and in terms of the approach used to incorporate these unrelated events in a story with minimal connections to these events themselves. Even though it had some originality, I do not think that in this context this was a good thing. This is why I will give it a 3 for the level of originality.

In terms of characters, I believe they are all just voices of the author, without too many distinguishable features. So I will rate it with a 1.

Regarding the complexity and difficulty, I must acknowledge that this novel was probably pretty difficult to write. And perhaps it ended up being so complex that I am unable to understand it thoroughly. So I will rate it with a 3 for complexity and difficulty, thinking that perhaps there is more hidden under the surface that I was not able to reach to.

In terms of credibility, there aren't too many debatable things in this novel. The 3 historical events I already mentioned are basically described journalistic like. Besides them there is only the Bill Gray story. As described in the synopsis he is a writer that has published only two novels severla years back from the present time, and works now on his third novel for few decades without managing to finish it. His story contains few facts but out of them, his self imposed isolation seems the least credible. Taking all into account my rating for credibility is 4.

The last criteria is edition. I enjoyed this little book published back in 1997 that I was still able to find in bookshops last year when I bought it. The paper was slightly too grey and it started to smell like some of my older books. Aside from that, I also was not able to understand the cover connection with the content. This are the reasons why I will rate it with a 2.

To summarize, I could not relate the story of Bill Gray (that anyhow has no actual conflict closure) with the 3 historical events I already mentioned are also present in the novel. Maybe just the point that contemporary literature ignores important contemporary events, but I don't believe it at all. All in all, my final rating for the novel is 2.14, which I will round it to a 2 on Goodreads system.

+--------------------------+-----------------+
| Criteria | Rating |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Premise | 1 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Form | 1 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Originality | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Characters | 1 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Difficulty/Complexity | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Credibility | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Edition | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Total | 2.14 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+

For more details on how I rated and reviewed this novel, please read these guidelines.

It’s really hard to write a book that is both literary and has a good plot. This is literary only. It’s about human groups, God, politics, and terror, and how these things relate. It’s also about writing, writers, and the importance of art.

But in my opinion, the actual plot is awful. I don’t care about any of the characters except maybe Karen but I want to read a whole book about Karen’s adventures (as a Moonie and beyond) and thoughts. I didn’t care for Karen’s self-objectification though. And then the characters have sort of random unrelated actions that don’t unify into a narrative.

"'We make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.'
She reloads and shoots."

Photography, violence, cults, terrorism, and a broken artist. DeLillo is prophetic. News: the last great addiction. Then, what's next? Because this is true. And we've never been more addicted than right now.

Tract houses at the edge of a desert. What's the point? What's the purpose?

"Mao said death can be as light as a feather or as heavy as a mountain. You die for the people and the nation, your death is massive and intense. Die for the oppressors, die working for the exploiters, and manipulators, die selfish and vain and you float away like a feather of the smallest bird."

The plot follows a writer who has not made an appearance in years. A photographer who takes his picture. A cult. Mao. And terrorism in Beirut. For me, it felt like the plot shattered in the middle. These things felt like they were together, and then everything just fragmented into pieces. The writer ended up here, there, destroyed along the way. The photographer ended up at what might as well be called the edge of the earth, a desert of killing and bombing and stealing and terrorizing and trying to stay alive.

I guess what I got from this book is that the world is at that edge. We could tip over at any moment into absolute fracture and war. This, juxtaposed with what the photographer sees at the very end of the book: a tank rolling by; newlyweds; confetti; bursts; smoke; guns; happiness; celebration; war; dilapidation; emptiness; the desert; bursts; nothing.

Where's the truth? What is this insanity that is happening all around me? And what do I do?

DeLillo is as master of leaving you thinking and questioning absolutely everything. Every book stays with me, and I see his descriptions every where I go. Godlike, prophetic, haunting, and moving.

Delillo's novels, with all of their portentous dread and paranoia about modern life, have often left me cold and unimpressed.

But somehow, I really enjoyed Mao II. Maybe it's because his prose here seems much more precise and focused than in White Noise, Libra and Underworld. Or maybe its because this book, about a reclusive American writer confronting a media saturated world of terrorism and ideological fervor, seems in its way just vastly more personal, more directly from the heart than anything present in his other books.

This is also his first novel (at least of the five I've read) in which the characters really stand on their own and aren't simply mouthpieces for his elegant reveries on our contemporary cultural moment. They feel like people with drives and wounds, and that makes the haunted perspectives he gives them all the more haunting. Mao II also contains (in my view) probably the best set-piece he's ever written: a delirious description of someone watching a T.V. broadcast of the Ayatollah Khomeni's funeral, which makes even the best sections from Underworld seem bloated and tedious. Highly recommended, even (and maybe especially) if you don't like Don Delillo.

I'd describe Mao II as an intellectual novel. Brimming with astute observations about modern life. And gorgeously written.
It begins with a mass cult wedding in a stadium. A troubled young girl called Karen is marrying a Korean man who knows about eight words of English. Her groom was chosen by Master, the head of the endtime cult.

Karen will soon end up as part of the sequestered household of a famous reclusive writer and his secretary.

The novel studies the ways we form into groups to achieve or reaffirm or change identity. (Eventually, we will encounter a terrorist group.) It's an incredibly prescient and prophetic novel. It's almost eerie how prevalent is the image of the Twin Towers in this book which deals with terrorism. It was written in 1991.

Just like Underworld, starts of with an insanely good prologue, but falls flat halfway through. Very unfortunate. Delillo shoots his wad too early, and once his point is made, not much is left..