by Don DeLillo
This unsettling novel offers an unpleasant vision of
emotional detachment in America 10 years ago.
Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
About Nancy Chapple
Mao II is not a fun book. It won't make you laugh out loud, nor will you cry
with gentle joy when the hero is reunited with the princess. The book is
unsettling, a prescient book about what ails the modern world.
It is written from a bizarre distance. The author is far away from us
readers - and has no mercy with us. It's as if he finds the world - or more
narrowly, the US - an incredibly strange place, and he'll go to any length
to prove it to us. We don't yearn to meet him - or his characters - at any
imaginary cocktail party ...
Mao II is a book of ideas told through three-dimensional characters. Most of
the characters are lonely and unsure how - or even whether - they fit into
the world as a whole. Long passages, entire chapters are in dialogue, and
who the characters are and how they interrelate is revealed in what they say
rather than in wordy descriptive passages. There's an easy flow from
dialogue to inner monologue, though DeLillo doesn't use 'he said' or 'she
thought'.
One of the book's themes is about losing one's identity in a mass of people.
The opening scene - a Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium - is as unsettling on
second reading, ten years later, as it was the first time around. In another
spooky scene, a crowd of spectators is crushed at a football stadium in
Europe - but our narrator is not on the scene, nor is she discussing what
she saw or heard or read with others; she's watching TV with the sound off,
her boyfriend asleep next to her. This character is uniquely susceptible to
atmosphere and to influences; she often serves as a filter for what's going
on in the outside world.
Another theme is about consuming the world visually. Another main character
is travelling around the world photographing writers, trying to capture an
ineffable something in their auras. In other passages, words describe the
process of writing visually, reversing the process. "Here was the old,
marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early
alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided
boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows
scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist." Andy Warhol's paintings
of popular icons are also discussed - hence the book's title.
Mao II is also about terrorism and anonymity. Terrorism from a 1991 vantage
point does not mean a huge gesture hurting Americans to their very core; it
means a cold, vague threat to the individual - torture drumming who you are
out of you; the act of standing up to terrorism as a gesture of humanity. A
representative of a terrorist group tries to persuade Bill to make a
significant political gesture: "Isn't it the novelist . who knows in his
soul what the terrorist thinks and feels? Through history it's the novelist
who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are
your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord,
the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?"
Why do I love such an uncomfortable work? Because it is so spookily
absorbing and perfectly crafted. It's hard to put down. And it changes how
you perceive the world.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Mao II
Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2002
Reviewed by Nancy Chapple:
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--Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood - by Alexandra Fuller
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--Mao II - by Don DeLillo
--The Last Samurai - by Helen DeWitt
--A Perfect Spy - by John le Carré
--The Duke of Deception - by Geoffrey Wolff
--The Loser - by Thomas Bernhard
--A Room of One’s Own - by Virginia Woolf
--Ragtime - by E.L. Doctorow
--This Boy’s Life - by Tobias Wolff
-- From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by E. L. Konigsburg
--Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer
--Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
--Winter’s Tale - by Mark Helprin
--Harriet the Spy - by Louise Fitzhugh
--Dispatches - by Michael Herr
--Minor Characters - by Joyce Johnson
--Writing Creative Nonfiction: Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs - by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard
--The Complete Chronicles of Narnia
- by C. S. Lewis
-- Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction - by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer
--Angela’s Ashes - by Frank McCourt
--Old Glory - by Jonathan Raban
-- Postmodern Pooh - by Frederick Crews
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