Mao II: A Novel
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Mao II: A Novel description
Don DeLillo's follow-up to Libra, his brilliant fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, Mao II is a series of elusive set-pieces built around the themes of mass psychology, individualism vs. the mob, the power of imagery and the search for meaning in a blasted, post-modern world. Bill Gray, the world's most famous reclusive novelist, has been working for many years on a stalled masterpiece when he gets the chance to aid a hostage trapped in a basement in war-torn Beirut. Gray sets out on a doomed, quixotic journey, and his disappearance disrupts the cloistered lives of his obsessed assistant and the assistant's companion, a former Moonie who has also become Bill's lover. This haunting, masterful novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. |
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Mao II: A Novel Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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And thus we go widescreen
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| When I try to imagine a Delillo novel, this is the kind of thing that I envision, characters flitting through jagged set pieces like shadows, locations fraught with quivering meaning, dialogue that sounds like people talking each other and knowing that and not caring, and strings holding the pieces together so tightly and so finely that you'll have run right through before you realize you've even been cut. It's the most elusive of all of his novels, at its best when it's setting a mood and sketching out the picture, hinting that the full image may be too much for us to bear. Right from the start it sets the tone, with the mass wedding, a supposedly joyous event reduced to something mechanical and faceless, watched over with nothing more than a spiralling despair. The central focus of the novel is on reclusive writer Bill Gray, who has written well received literary fiction but like Thomas Pynchon stays out of sight. He spends most of his time endlessly tweaking a masterpiece that he really will never release and is eventually drawn out by a photographer and an offer to help out a hostage across the ocean. The plot doesn't so much move as seep, sliding from scene to scene with only bare connections, with each of the four main characters acting as ripples, and the scenes occuring when they hit each other. But the biggest ripple is Bill Gray, who acts as a rock hitting a placid lake, sending the lives of everyone else whirling out of whack simply by not being around, as everyone moves to close to hole or perhaps decide if a hole is even there. Meanwhile Gray enters a world where terrorism and mass media collide, globetrotting aimlessly of a quest that may be pointless, or perhaps worse. Delillo's writing is as sharp as ever here, each scene drawn tight, with barely a word wasted. All his usual tricks are here, but everything seems slightly more intense, even if the ultimate meaning of it all isn't exactly clear. Finding what connections there are, if any, requires more work than most of his novels, and as the characters dance about and circle and taunt each other, you may be wondering what the point of it all is. It's bleak, but in an illuminating fashion, and it seems possessed of its own internal logic. Like being immersed in a dark lake, you know you're inside but you don't know what you're even looking at. Strangely ignored out of his catalog, it has new resonance today, not simply because it deals with the facets of terrorism, but in showing how the different elements of a wider society can connect, in ways that we aren't even beginning to understand. |
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