Mao II

Last updated
Mao II
Mao II.jpg
Author Don DeLillo
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Viking
Publication date
20 June 1991
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages256 (hardback first edition)
ISBN 0-670-83904-3
OCLC 22766802
813/.54 20
LC Class PS3554.E4425 M36 1991

Mao II, published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. The book tells the story of a novelist, struggling to finish a novel, who travels to Lebanon to assist a writer being held hostage. The title is derived from a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints depicting Mao Zedong. DeLillo dedicated the book to his friend Gordon Lish. Major themes of the book include crowds and the effects of political terrorism. Mao II received positive reviews from critics and won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. [1]

Contents

Plot summary

A reclusive novelist named Bill Gray works endlessly on a novel which he chooses not to finish. He has chosen a life secluded from the outside world in order to try to keep his writing pure. He, along with his assistant Scott, believes that something is lost once a mass audience reads the work. Scott would prefer Bill didn't publish the book for fear that the mass-production of the work will destroy the "real" Bill. Bill has a dalliance with Scott's partner Karen Janney, a former member of the Unification Church who is married to Kim Jo Pak in a Unification Church Blessing ceremony in the prologue of the book.

Bill, who lives as a complete recluse, accedes to be photographed by a New York photographer named Brita who is documenting writers. In dialogue with Brita and others, Bill laments that novelists are quickly becoming obsolete in an age where terrorism has supplanted art as the "raids on consciousness" that jolt and transform culture at large. Bill disappears without a word and secretly decides to accept an opportunity from his former editor Charles to travel to London to publicly speak on the behalf of a Swiss writer held hostage in war-torn Beirut.

Meanwhile, Karen ends up living in Brita's New York apartment and spends most of her time in the homeless slums of Tompkins Square Park. In London, Bill is introduced to George Haddad, a representative of the Maoist group responsible for kidnapping the writer. Bill decides to go to Lebanon himself and negotiate the release of the writer. Cutting himself off from Charles, he flees to Cyprus where he awaits a ship that will take him to Lebanon.

In Cyprus, Bill is hit by a car and suffers a lacerated liver which, exacerbated by his heavy drinking, kills him in his sleep while en route to Beirut. In the epilogue, Brita goes to Beirut to photograph Abu Rashid, the terrorist responsible for the kidnapping. The fate of the hostage is never revealed, though the implication is grim. The plot unfolds with DeLillo's customary shifts of time, setting, and character.

Themes

The last sentence of the prologue reveals an important and major theme in Mao II: "The future belongs to crowds." Crowds feature heavily in the book, from the opening crowds of thousands at the mass wedding at Yankee Stadium, to the crowds living in Tompkins Square Park, to the thousands of mourners at the Ayatollah's funeral as observed on television by Karen. The nature of crowds and their relation to personal and collective identity are explored.

In predicting an age of terror in which "the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings," DeLillo was eerily ahead of his time in contemplating the profound effect that political terror was soon to have on American society. The question of the efficacy of art in the context of dogmatism and violence of a massive scale is central to the narrative. In preparing the novel, DeLillo's editor at Viking, Nan Graham, said, "Long before he had written anything Don told me he had two folders -- one marked 'art' and the other marked 'terror.'" [2]

Just two years before the novel was published Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie after his publication of The Satanic Verses and New York Post photographers had ambushed J. D. Salinger in New Hampshire. DeLillo cited the published Salinger photograph and a photograph of a Unification Church Blessing ceremony he came across as inspiration for the book, telling Vince Passaro:

I didn't know it at the time, but these two pictures would represent the polar extremes of "Mao II," the arch individualist and the mass mind, from the mind of the terrorist to the mind of the mass organization. In both cases, it's the death of the individual that has to be accomplished before their aims can be realized. [2]

Thomas Pynchon blurb

Notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon provided the blurb for Mao II. It reads: "This novel's a beauty. DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond the official versions of our daily history, behind all easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."

Reception

In The Washington Post , Sven Birkerts referred to Mao II as one of DeLillo's best novels. While arguing that "the tension that gathers around Gray dissipates towards the end and the final pages feel unfocused", Birkerts praised the ways in which the crowd motif is threaded throughout the novel and also praised the secondary characters, writing, "There is always a new angle, a new window onto a world in its paroxysms of transformation." Birkerts lauded the work as "DeLillo's strongest statement yet about the crisis of crises. Namely: that we are living in the last violet twilight of the individual". [3] In The New York Times, Lorrie Moore wrote that "no one's prose is better than Mr. DeLillo's", and noted the author's "way of capturing a representative slice of a city, his ability to reproduce ineffable urban rhythms, his startling evocations of sights and smells." While writing that she was more "engaged and impressed" than moved by Mao II and that the novel has less emotional depth than White Noise and Libra, Moore still praised DeLillo's ability to convey multiple points of view and argued that "within its own defined parameters [...] Mr. DeLillo's new book succeeds as brilliantly as any of his others." [4]

A reviewer for Publishers Weekly deemed the novel a "remarkable achievement" and stated, "The beauty of DeLillo's prose enlivens such seemingly dry questions. Mao II reconfirms DeLillo's status as a modern master and literary provocateur." [5] It also received praise in Kirkus Reviews , where the reviewer wrote that the author's "talking heads murmur the mysteries of our age. For all its 'cool gloom,' his latest novel stands in denial of Gray's doom-drenched semiotics: it's a luminous book, full of anger deflected into irony, with moments of hard-earned transcendence." [6]

Conversely, John Lanchester argued in the London Review of Books that Mao II had a "rather over-schematic central theme and plot-strand” and criticized the novel as "[trying] to force home Gray’s arguments that ‘what terrorists gain, novelists lose’. This, oddly enough, is to do those ideas a disservice, as, in Keats's famous words, ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.’ I don’t think I will be the only reader of Mao II to miss DeLillo in his comic vein, the comic vein which hasn’t at all precluded seriousness in his other work; its absence in Mao II is, I’m afraid, likely to have something to do with a vocational self-importance." [7] In The New York Review of Books , Robert Towers wrote, "Mao II is a more somber work, less concentrated as a narrative; and it is shorter than either of its predecessors. The cast of characters is relatively small, and the characters themselves, while sharply delineated, are perhaps less interesting in the long run than the images and themes that cluster around them." [8]

Mao II was placed in the second tier ("Recommended") in a 2007 New York guide to DeLillo's oeuvre, where the novel was described as "DeLillo at his most aphoristic [...] Less a novel than a series of crowd-scene set pieces linked by a reclusive novelist’s attempt to free a poet hostage, it contains his most extended thoughts on the relationship between fiction and terrorism." [9] In 2011, Martin Amis listed Mao II among his favorite novels in DeLillo’s output. [10] In a 2016 retrospective write-up for Granta , Colin Barrett lauded Mao II as a "mordantly funny, casually prescient, hypnotically condensed novel about art, about terror [...] short, loosely plotted but simultaneously tight as a drum". [11] Jeff Somers ranked it sixth among 17 DeLillo books, arguing that "it doesn’t have much of a plot and can be perceived as DeLillo disappearing into himself—but when you’re as strong a writer as DeLillo, you can get away with that. Its seemingly prophetic vision of terrorist acts to come (it was published in 1991) grant the book gravitas". [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Updike</span> American writer (1932–2009)

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don DeLillo</span> American novelist, playwright, and essayist (born 1936)

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Gaddis</span> American novelist (1922–1998)

William Thomas Gaddis Jr. was an American novelist. The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005 and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.

<i>Underworld</i> (novel) 1997 novel by Don DeLillo

Underworld is a 1997 novel by American writer Don DeLillo. The novel is centered on the efforts of Nick Shay, a waste management executive who grew up in the Bronx, to trace the history of the baseball that won the New York Giants the pennant in 1951, and encompasses numerous subplots drawn from American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Described as both postmodernist and a reaction to postmodernism, it examines themes of nuclear proliferation, waste, and the contribution of individual lives to the course of history.

<i>Libra</i> (novel) 1988 novel by Don DeLillo

Libra is a 1988 novel by Don DeLillo that describes the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and his participation in a fictional CIA conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. The novel blends historical fact with fictional supposition.

<i>White Noise</i> (novel) 1985 novel by Don DeLillo

White Noise is the eighth novel by Don DeLillo, published by Viking Press in 1985. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

<i>End Zone</i> Novel by Don DeLillo

End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.

Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock and Zeroville, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.

<i>Players</i> (DeLillo novel) 1977 novel by Don DeLillo

Players is Don DeLillo's fifth novel, published in 1977. It follows Lyle and Pammy Wynant, a young and affluent Manhattan couple whose casual boredom is overturned by their willing participation in chaotic detours from the everyday.

Gordon Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Rick Bass, Tom Spanbauer, and Richard Ford. He is the father of the novelist Atticus Lish.

<i>The Names</i> (novel) 1982 novel by Don DeLillo

The Names (1982) is the seventh novel of American novelist Don DeLillo. The work, set mostly in Greece, is primarily a series of character studies, interwoven with a plot about a mysterious "language cult" that is behind a number of unexplained murders. Among the many themes explored throughout the work is the intersection of language and culture, the perception of American culture from both within and outside its borders, and the impact that narration has on the facts of a story.

<i>Falling Man</i> (novel) 2007 novel by Don DeLillo

Falling Man is a novel by American writer Don DeLillo, published May 15, 2007. An excerpt from the novel appeared in short story form as "Still Life" in the April 9, 2007, issue of The New Yorker magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachel Kushner</span> American writer (born 1968)

Rachel Kushner is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018).

<i>Point Omega</i> Novel by Don DeLillo

Point Omega is a short novel by the American author Don DeLillo that was published in hardcover by Scribner's on February 2, 2010. It is DeLillo's fifteenth novel published under his own name and his first published work of fiction since his 2007 novel Falling Man.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Viken Berberian</span> American novelist

Viken Berberian is a writer and essayist whose works rely on satire and defy easy categorization. Berberian's fiction and essays have appeared in print and online in The New York Times, le Monde Diplomatique, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, Granta, BOMB, The Nation, and the New York Review of Books. His novels have been translated to French, Hebrew, Italian, German and Dutch. They are marked by keen wit and a sense of economic and political injustice.

Thomas LeClair is a writer, literary critic, and was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati until 2009. He has been a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the Daily Beast.

<i>Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y</i> 1997 film

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, a 68-minute-long film by director Johan Grimonprez, traces the history of airplane hijacking as portrayed by mainstream television media. The film premiered in 1997 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne (Centre Georges Pompidou ; and at Catherine David's curated Documenta X. "This study in pre-Sept. 11 terrorism" is composed of archival footage material — interspersing reportage shots, clips from science fiction films, found footage, home video and reconstituted scenes. The work is interspersed with passages from Don DeLillo's novels Mao II and White Noise, "providing a literary and philosophic anchor to the film". According to the director, "Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y's narrative is based on an imagined dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist where the writer contends that the terrorist has hijacked his role within society." The film's opening line, taken from Mao II, introduces the skyjacker as protagonist. Interspersing fact and fiction, Grimonprez said that the use of archival footage to create "short-circuits in order to critique a situation" may be understood as a form of a Situationist Détournement.

<i>Zero K</i> (novel) 2016 novel by Don DeLillo

Zero K is a 2016 novel by American author Don DeLillo.

<i>The Making of Incarnation</i> 2021 novel by Tom McCarthy

The Making of Incarnation is a 2021 novel by English writer Tom McCarthy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?</span> 2006 poll of writers

"What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" is an informal opinion poll conducted in 2006 by the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) to determine "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Eligible works were those written by an American author and published during the quarter-century period from 1980 through 2005. The poll was conducted by NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus, who sent letters to literary figures requesting their participation and received 124 responses. The results were published on May 21, 2006, in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. An essay by A. O. Scott, titled "In Search of the Best", reflected on the results and the premise of the "Great American Novel".

References

  1. ↑ Streitfeld, David (April 1, 1992). "DELILLO'S 'MAO' WINS PEN AWARD". The Washington Post . Retrieved July 16, 2022.
  2. 1 2 "Dangerous Don DeLillo", May 19, 1991 New York Times
  3. ↑ Birkerts, Sven (1991-05-26). "THE FUTURE BELONGS TO CROWDS". Washington Post. ISSN   0190-8286 . Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  4. ↑ Moore, Lorrie (1991-06-09). "Look for a Writer and Find a Terrorist". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  5. ↑ "Fiction Book Review: Mao II by Don DeLillo". www.publishersweekly.com. Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  6. ↑ MAO II by Don DeLillo | Kirkus Reviews.
  7. ↑ Lanchester, John (1991-09-12). "Oh my oh my oh my · LRB 12 September 1991". London Review of Books. 13 (17). Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  8. ↑ Towers, Robert (1991-06-27). "History Novel". The New York Review of Books. ISSN   0028-7504 . Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  9. ↑ "Our Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre -- New York Magazine - Nymag". New York Magazine. 4 May 2007. Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  10. ↑ Amis, Martin (2011-11-14). "Laureate of Terror". The New Yorker. ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  11. ↑ Barrett, Colin (2016-12-22). "Best Book of 1991: Mao II by Don DeLillo". Granta Magazine. Retrieved 2019-12-25.
  12. ↑ Somers, Jeff (2018-08-02). "Don DeLillo's Novels, Ranked". Barnes & Noble Reads. Retrieved 2019-12-25.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.