Fiction, American Fiction, World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Mao II

Name: Mao II
Author: Don DeLillo
ISBN: 9780140152746

by Don DeLillo

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Overview

"One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover—and Bill's.

Synopsis

"One of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times), Don DeLillo presents an extraordinary new novel about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist. At the heart of the book is Bill Gray, a famous reclusive writer who escapes the failed novel he has been working on for many years and enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms. Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover--and Bill's.

Michiko Kakutani

Disturbing, provocative and darkly comic, Mao II reads, at once, as a sociological meditation on the perils of contemporary society, and as a kind of new-wave thriller....The writing, as usual, is dazzling; the book's images, so radioactive that they glow afterward in our minds. -- New York Times

About the Author, Don DeLillo

Flooring readers with his complex, intelligent evocations of modern-day America and the philosophical challenges of living in it, Don DeLillo swiftly established himself as an important writer. His wide-ranging, somewhat strange novels go less for the emotions than for the reader's very interpretations of reality.

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Editorials

Michiko Kakutani

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Each of DeLillo's previous nine novels (White Noise; Libra; etc.) has been a tour de force. This newest work is another remarkable achievement. It is almost as if DeLillo's words have value apart from the story they recount; sentences chill, scenes amaze, chapter endings reverberate, and the reader is transfixed. A reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, is drawn back into the world by acts of terrorism and by the visit of a woman who has come to photograph him for her ongoing and endless project to capture the images of the world's authors. Gradually, the novel, dense but accessible, concerns itself with the inevitable conflict between the power of the crowd and the power of the individual. Which is the motor of the world: The novelist, who may write alone in his room and yet affect masses? The terrorist, who is an individual working in concert with a larger movement which he may or may not control? The "master'' who controls masses? (The lover of Gray's assistant has been a Moonie: the opening scene, a mass wedding, is a brilliant set piece). The beauty of DeLillo's prose enlivens such seemingly dry questions. Mao II reconfirms DeLillo's status as a modern master and literary provocateur.

Library Journal

This extraordinary story focuses on one Bill Gray, a reclusive writer whose legend abounds while he slowly deteriorates from drinking, drugs, and depression. His assistant Scott keeps his image alive yet mysterious. "Years ago there were stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba, Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word. . . . . Now Bill was devising his own cycle of death and resurgence. It made Scott think of great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns. Mao Zedong of course.'' Enter Brita Nilsson, photographer of writers and terrorists, who captures Bill's likeness on film for the first time in more than three decades and pushes him to publish his last great novel. Publisher Charlie gives Bill a PR offer he can't refuse, and the story concludes on the violent streets of Beirut. DeLillo's style is wonderfully expressive yet dark in tone. Readers will thoroughly enjoy it. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/91.-- Kevin M. Roddy, Oakland P.L., Cal.