Mao II

Mao II Review

Don DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992, and the novel deserves the recognition not because it is his most immediately pleasurable work — it is not — but because it is his most intellectually precise. In 241 pages, DeLillo states and develops his central theme more directly than anywhere else in his fiction: the competition between the novelist and the terrorist for the power to alter human consciousness.

Bill Gray is a reclusive American novelist who has not published in decades, living under a false name with a small household of devotees — a situation unmistakably modeled on J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon — whose unpublished manuscript grows and is revised but never finished. His assistant, Scott, manages his isolation with the fanaticism of a cultist, literally worshipping the idea of the withdrawn literary giant. When a photographer named Brita Nilsson comes to photograph Gray — one of a series of portraits of writers she is compiling — the encounter disrupts the compound’s careful equilibrium and sets the novel’s thin plot in motion.

The plot involves Gray being recruited to read a statement on behalf of a Swiss-Maoist poet held hostage by a group in Beirut. It is not a thriller. DeLillo is uninterested in the mechanics of the hostage situation; he is interested in what the situation reveals about the novelist’s place in a media-saturated world. The novel’s thesis, stated explicitly by Bill Gray, is that the terrorist and the writer once competed for the same territory — the power to change how people see — but the competition is over: “What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The novel is breathing its last.” In a world organized by images, crowds, and spectacle, the patient, individual art of fiction has been superseded.

The opening section of Mao II — a mass Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium, depicted with DeLillo’s characteristic mix of fascination and dread — establishes the novel’s counter-image to the reclusive novelist: the crowd, the mass movement, the human aggregation that erases individual identity. The final section, in Beirut, offers a corresponding image of a city organized entirely by violence and faction. Between these two forms of collective annihilation, Bill Gray disappears — literally, in the plot, and figuratively, as the representative of a literary culture that has lost its claim on the public imagination. It is DeLillo’s bleakest and most honest assessment of his own vocation.

The PEN/Faulkner Award

Mao II won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1992, recognition that confirmed DeLillo’s standing as one of the major American literary novelists of his generation. The award was particularly appropriate for a novel about the relationship between writers and public attention: the PEN/Faulkner is administered by writers, for writers, and its recognition of Mao II was a statement by DeLillo’s peers that his diagnosis of the literary condition deserved its own kind of attention.

DeLillo was born November 20, 1936 in the Bronx, and his career trajectory — from obscure experimental novelist in the 1970s to National Book Award winner (White Noise, 1985) to PEN/Faulkner winner (Mao II, 1991) to his magnum opus (Underworld, 1997) — mirrors the institutional recognition that Bill Gray, Mao II’s protagonist, has deliberately refused. The irony is structural: DeLillo, who writes about a reclusive novelist who believes visibility has become corrupted, accepted major awards and engaged carefully with the literary culture. He is not Gray; but he understands Gray.

Warhol and the Title

The novel’s title refers to a Warhol screenprint: multiple images of Mao Zedong reproduced in different colours, the same image repeated until it becomes an aesthetic object rather than a representation of a person. This is DeLillo’s clearest statement of his theme: in a media culture, repetition drains meaning from images, including images of political figures, including images of writers. The terrorist understands this intuitively — which is why the act of mass violence, which cannot be repeated without losing its horror, retains the power to change consciousness that the novel has surrendered.

The Moonie mass wedding that opens the novel is the same image in different form: thousands of identical white-dressed figures, individual identity dissolved into collective spectacle. DeLillo is as fascinated as he is disturbed by this image. The crowd is not simply evil in his rendering; it is a response to something that individuals cannot satisfy alone.

The Novel’s Legacy

Mao II published in 1991 looks, from the vantage of the twenty-first century, like prophecy. The competition between writers and terrorists for the power to change consciousness that DeLillo identified has been joined since 9/11 by a third competitor: social media, which can produce mass reality-changing events without the novelist’s patience or the terrorist’s violence. DeLillo’s thesis has expanded rather than contracted in the decades since the novel appeared, and Mao II reads now as a founding document for a cultural analysis that the subsequent decades have only confirmed.

Bill Gray as Type

Bill Gray’s reclusion — the false name, the unpublished manuscript, the household of devoted followers managing his invisibility — is clearly drawn from the American tradition of the literary recluse: J.D. Salinger, who published nothing after 1965, and Thomas Pynchon, who gave no public interviews and refused photographs. DeLillo is not satirising these figures; he is using the type to examine what the withdrawal means in cultural terms. The reclusive novelist has become, paradoxically, a public image precisely through his absence: an image of artistic integrity, of refusal, of the claim that the work is more important than the self. DeLillo’s point is that this image is still an image — still operates within the media culture that Gray thinks he has escaped. There is no position outside the system, only different positions within it.

Mao II is, among DeLillo’s novels, the most useful for understanding his entire project: it states his central preoccupations directly and locates them in the specific cultural moment of the late Cold War. Reading it alongside White Noise and Underworld provides the clearest available map of what DeLillo was trying to do across his career.