Mao II (urspr publ 1991; utgåvan 1991)

Pretty good, but less so than I had hoped given the talk about art and such toward the beginning. He really roped me into thinking this was going to be a great novel of ideas, but it meandered a bit and seemed pretty uneven. On the whole a worthwhile read. ( )

I liked how this book had some really great ideas. The whole thing about the link between terrorism and novelists is really interesting and smart. I love it, actually. Unfortunately, this book comes off as just an excuse to get that idea across. I wish it had been better fleshed out or thought out. Ultimately I just sort of didn't care about the characters or where the story was going, which... I mean, unless I missed something, wasn't much. ( )

Read it, don't recall anything much about it now ( )

The set piece that opens Mao II perfectly establishes the tone of the novel: a huge crowd of people has gathered in the stands at Yankee Stadium to witness the mass wedding ceremony of 13,000 followers of the Korean cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. The estranged parents of one young woman search despondently to find their daughter on the field, but she is anonymous in the midst of thousands of identically dressed brides who are standing next to the identically dressed grooms they barely know. The crowd, it seems, has swallowed the individual as the betrothed couples symbolically pledge their allegiance to both the movement and their Moonie master.

More intense scenes of crowds follow in this book that is as much about ideas and images as it is about plot and story. Several people are crushed to death at a soccer game as a horde of gate-crashers push the capacity of the stadium past its limits. A million people gather in a great square in China beneath a portrait of Mao Zedong. A woman wanders through a New York City park that is overrun by a nameless, faceless throng of homeless people, trying to help in what little ways she can. Two individuals sit in the seclusion of an apartment and watch on television as hundreds of thousands mourn at the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini. As the author himself puts it: “The future belongs to crowds.”

The plot of Mao II embeds another of its provocative themes: how terrorists have supplanted the role of novelists to shock and capture the public’s collective imagination. Bill Gray is in self-imposed exile after his early success as a novelist made him a celebrated figure. Protected by a young assistant and his girlfriend—a deprogrammed Moonie—Gray has spent the last 23 years working on a new book that he may never finish. Two events bring him out of isolation: the arrival of photographer obsessed with capturing the images of famous writers and a request from his former editor to aid in freeing a poet who is being held hostage by radical Maoist revolutionaries in the Middle East. The protagonist’s increasing involvement in the rescue attempt, along with the juxtaposition between the hostage and Gray himself, is the story line that drives the narrative.

This novel was written right after White Noise and Libra and immediately before Underworld, which places it squarely in the middle of the most productive part of Don DeLillo’s lengthy and remarkable career. Although Mao II lacks some of the depth and complexity (and even some of the dark humor) of those other works, it is still a compelling piece of fiction that challenges the reader throughout. DeLillo is masterful when it comes to embedding captivating thoughts into taut, well-crafted sentences. He is also frequently prophetic. The terror motif that defines this work anticipated both the Oklahoma City bombing and September 11th by several years; in fact, his occasional descriptions of the twin towers are simply haunting. More than a quarter-century after its publication, this remains relevant story-telling. ( )

There is a review by "Brad" dated January 15, 2010 that is very good and sums up how I feel and discusses the themes well.

I did like White Noise better; I thought Mao II was spotty. ( )