Mao II

Rating:
Summary: The world, cold and clear
Review: I had to counterbalance some of the negative reviews on this page. DeLillo's observations of contemporary life (in the States and abroad) are second to none. The prose is at once lyrical and abrupt. Scenes are sketched in with a miniaturist's skill. The incident with Karen accidentally altering an artwork in a Manhattan gallery is worth the price of the book. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I like Don DeLillo. "White Noise" is among my favorite books of the 1980s. But he really drops the ball here. This book reads like an unrevised first draft. The diamond-hard sentences of "White Noise" have now given way to flaccid stream-of-consciousness mumbling. The plot is similarly unfocused; I kept expecting all these threads to tie together more neatly, but they never do. And the flimsy scenario DeLillo has contrived here can hardly support all these grandiose meditations on contemporary society, which seem forced into the texture of the novel. One soon tires of lengthy scenes in which the characters dilate endlessly upon the social importance of the evening news, while saying things like "I have my own cosmology of pain." Give DeLillo credit: he has important things to say. The problem is that he's said everything here more memorably in previous books.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing effort after the brilliance of "Libra"
Review: I looked forward to reading this book after reading Libra, but I found it too pushy in it's imagery. It seemed DeLillo felt he had to dazzle the reader with his ability to string metaphors together, but all he really did was to create an empty string of random thoughts that never really come together as a cohesive picture.

Rating:
Summary: Lacking in focus and clarity
Review: I really enjoyed "White Noise." I found the characters and the story interesting. "Mao II" falls way short of the level of "White Noise." The story seems to lack focus. DeLillo seems to be trying to make social commentary with every little detail here. This reader ultimately had very little concern for the characters or curiousity over the eventual outcome.

Rating:
Summary: What a shame . . .
Review: I think I was spoiled by Underworld, which I read recently and which was my introduction to DeLillo. There is more artistry, beauty, complexity, poetry, and thought in the first 50 pages of Underworld than in all 241 of Mao II. Mao II is only an "intellectual novel" in the sense that the plot is formulaic, the characterizations poor, and most of the dialogues speeches from the author. DeLillo's ideas of images and culture and identity would be more provocative if they were not ladled out in such self-gratifying, stultifying dialogue. The protagonist's photo shoot is particularly insufferable and the whole novel seemed to be one massive stroking of the author's ego. There are, it is true, some great passages, the most remarkable, for my money, being an exchange between the protagonist and his publisher. But overall this seems to be a lazy work; too much is taken for granted and not enough strived for -- all of the novel's propositions are played out either in monotonous speeches or the most contrived plot development. Again, perhaps I have been spoiled by the unremitting genius and power of Underworld and nothing else will compare.

Rating:
Summary: Won the Pen/Faulkner for a reason
Review: In this book, Don DeLillo likens novelists to terrorists, an idea I had not yet thought of until reading this book and an idea that makes sense after reading this book. The author in this story, Bill, is similar to Chairman Mao in that he is very seclusive and through his seclusion gains infamy. Mao announced each reappearance with a flood of pictures, though the pictures represent a different type of appearance for Bill, one that can not be given away without entirely giving away the plot. This is the first DeLillo book and as I write this I plan to go to the bookstore and buy either Libra or White Noise. At first glance the ending was weak, but when I sat down and thought about it (as I do with most books when I finish them) it is more powerful than you would think at first glance.

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical but hollow
Review: Mao II has some wonderful descriptive scenes - for example, the mass wedding with which it opens. But the book lacks three dimensional, human characters, and in the end DeLillo's snazzy writing and imagery fall flat. I read it in stops and starts, because it just didn't compel me. However, I bought Underworld recently, and I'm going to give DeLillo a second try.

Rating:
Summary: Mao II
Review: Mao II is a reasonably short book that is by turns about a reclusive writer struggling with a book he knows that will never be finished and the people around him, and the struggles of terrorism and the middle east, cults and brain-washing. At times, this book written in 1991 is strangely prophetic of the September 11 events, and as in the other Delillo book I have read, New York city is a prominent location, the World Trade Centres ominous characters, prescient in their apparent eternity.

Bill is a writer who has been working on his third novel for decades. It has been finished, years ago, he now obsessively edits and reviews each and every page, never being completely satisfied with the results. In a lot of ways he enjoys being the faded recluse, enjoys being a writer who is not a commodity. Two other people live with him, Karen - a previous cult member - and Scott, once just a fan of Bill's but now a friend who helps tend to his affairs. In addition to this, Karen provides Bill with physical satisfaction, but the reasons for this are never really discussed or some into the story, in fact, I'm not entirely sure why that particularly subplot even existed.

A photographer, Brita, enters the cosy world the three have setup, and Bill allows her the first photos of him since he was a young man. They hit off, but more importantly, Bill's awareness of his place in the world is sparked once more. Soon he is meeting with his old editor and events take an odd and not exactly satisfactory turn, becoming more focused on the middle east and terrorism, and less on the life of a writer who is unhappy with himself.

From here, the novel deteriorates. While remaining technically enjoyable to read, I was much more interested in Bill's life than I was with Middle Eastern politics. The ending was unsatisfactory, and answered no questions - but then, what questions were raised? The plot involving Bill's redemption was dropped, and a subsequent development with a Swiss poet captured by terrorists in a bid to help raise the profile of the newly formed terror group and a literary community was not developed enough. Even Karen's cult background wasn't fully used.

Delillo's strengths are his prologues and his dialogue. The prologue was tight, forceful, and ended with a perfect sentence. It would have made a fantastic short story, and I felt that, once it was finished, I was in for an amazing ride. Dialogue is authentic, flows just like a real conversation, and contains many of the unfinished sentences and stray ramblings that people use when they talk. Both the prologue and the dialogues throughout felt as though they had been worked on, again and again, to get it right, while long stretches of plot or of description felt almost like an after-thought.

To conclude, I greatly enjoyed the first hundred and twenty pages or so. I didn't like the shift of focus, but a premise was built up that look promising, then that, too, was dropped. The result is an unfortunately hollow book. But perhaps I am missing something. It has received a lot of praise, and won awards, and I can't understand why. While written well, it just couldn't live up to the amazing prologue.

Rating:
Summary: A late 20th Cen. masterpiece
Review: Mao II is not a good place to start if one hasn't read DeLillo. That said, it is uniquely ambitious in scope among his novels, and bears some of his most luminious writing anywhere. I was shocked by the some of the lukewarm reviews posted here. A couple of the criticisms are valid - the plot COULD be seen as lacking, and some scenes are longer than expected. But this ain't no Patriot Games. This ain't no Air Force One, with Harrison Ford vanquishing Mideast terrorists with Old Glory wrapped 'round his Everyman shoulders. It's a serious meditation on cults of personality and mass culture, and on the role of the artist as aesthetic terrorist. I would argue that alleged liberties taken with plot are due not to his inattention to the needs of storytelling, but to the primacy which DeLillo grants language itself in this novel - to the music, rhythms, and cadences of the dialogue and highly crafted prose. I think that, while political, this is not a political novel. There's significant attention devoted to artistic process (main characters include a novelist and photographer). Maybe writers themselves will best appreciate both these insights and the remarkable intuitive ear he lends to his sentences. It's a novel of a poetic intensity that is rare even in DeLillo's work. Did I mention that it's beautifully written? If you haven't read DeLillo yet I'd suggest starting with Great Jones Street or Players instead. Just don't let these scrub reviews fool you about Mao II.

Rating:
Summary: Mixed feelings on Mao II
Review: Mao II is the first book of Don Delillo's I have ever read. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, getting into the minds of 63 year old writer Bill Gray and his live-in assistants, with all their human complexities, flaws, and obsessions. And along comes Brita, who photographs writers, to capture reclusive Bill's face on film and shake things up. Then, in the second half of the book, Bill agrees to go off at his publisher's request in aide of an unknown poet taken hostage. The book gets political from there, away from a world I relate to to scenes in London and Beirut with Bill, plus the here and there of his abandoned assistants, and Brita, without any sense of closure or the tightness of style and dialogue so beautifully painted in the first half of this book. In the final run, after a beginning so well rooted in American soil, I found it ultimately unbelievable that Bill Gray would face potential danger and run off like he does. I guess I feel shortchanged because I really loved these characters and would have like to see the narrative go deeper into their lives, and deal a lot less on the political level. Read it and make your own conclusions.