Rating: 
Summary: POETIC AND BEAUTIFUL BUT UNDERACHIEVED
Review: Mao II left me vexed. Had I enjoyed the work, had I appreciated the brilliant literary tide, or had I been expecting a deeper plot and a more climatic epilogue? First of all, before I begin my critiscism, I should tell you that Mao II contains paragraphs of such sweeping beauty that there are moments when the reader has to pause for breath. Never has Delillo's talent in contructing overhwhelmingly poetic and ironic sentences been more evident. This alone warrants purchase. The characters are superbly sculpted and conceived- they are a joy observe. Delillo has also created a world in this book; an alternate and compelling universe not far away from the real world but with an overdose of grimness and paradox. This too is a reader's delight. Now is my slightly disgusted note. The overall shallowness of the plot is not hidden by any of the above. You keep on expecting something shocking to occur, a twist in the tale. Unfortunately, this never happens. A novel requires a plot. Mao II doesn't have one worth mentioning. If you are looking for a logical and plot-rooted book, this is probably not what you're looking for. There was so much potential for a climax, and brilliant point at which all chaos culiminates, but the oppurtunity was wasted. To be honest, this is unlike Delillo. There are also sections where Delillo overstays and goes on and on and on about a specific scene when enough has already been put forth. Rather than spending 10+ pages on a single, decidedly insignificant event, Delillo could have delved deeper and perhaps developed an event to break the monotone. Mao II isn't typical Delillo. There is much more ulterior depth than, say, White Noise. It isn't a plot that drives this novel, it is its hypnotic mastery. Contemporary fiction fans who will cherish the book anyway. It is by no means Delillo's best, but Mao II contains deep insight not comparable to what is found in any of his other novels. Maybe this is the point. Maybe the plot is merely a diversion. Maybe the objective of Mao II is simply to convey this playful and unique beauty with words across the page and into the reader's head. If this is the objective, Mao II accomplishes it graciously.
Rating: 
Summary: I DON'T LIKE IT
Review: NOT TO DEMEAN MR. DELILLO'S QUALITY AS A WRITER. . .BUT I DID NOT CARE FOR THIS BOOK.
Rating: 
Summary: Squeezing Sparks from the Walking Wounded
Review: Perhaps the most effective moments (and there are many) in this brief novel occur when Don Delillo's characters ruminate over the cultural and political detritus of the late 20th century. Whether it be the observations of world-weary author of serious fiction as he travels towards war-torn Beirut, or the dreamy searches of a lapsed moonie walking pie-eyed through New York's Thompkins Square park, Delillo's disturbing observations are piled on with sparkling rapidity and conviction. Tangential analogies and arguments fly off each new thought like cosmic bottle rockets. By the book's finish, the reader--like the characters--walks wounded. In Delillo's world, the opportunity for art's powerful reverberations seems to grow as the spirituality of the age declines. As plot, the story centers on a famously reclusive writer's decision to come out of his self-imposed cocoon in order both to free another writer held hostage in the middle east and to reveal his own face to an increasingly fascinated public. Prompted to action in part by his dissatisfaction with the book he's been struggling with for years, the writer allows a photographer to enter his sanctuary and capture his image on film. But neither plot nor character are the strong suit here. What propels our interests is the sheer inertia of Delillo's vision and ideas. Around the central themes of revolution and popular culture as self-erasing forces are remarkable descriptive passages. The fatal crush of European football crowds, the appeal of faceless communism to the world's downtrodden, a mass marriage in a stadium, photography's relation to celebrity and death. Remarkable dialog, images and thoughts weave into a tumbling crazy-quilt of spiritual decay.
Rating: 
Summary: 250 pages of frighteningly keen perception
Review: Prepare to witness the raw, exposed chords of DeLillo's perception. Don't be suprised if you catch yourself thinking in his language, after reading him. Seeing the world as he does . . . if only for a moment.
Rating:
Summary: Delillo (somewhere between his best and worst)
Review: The best parts of this, Delillo's tenth, novel come early on when the principal character's histories and current lives are being set up. The four characters presented here serve as a contrast to earlier Delillo novels in that there is a greater range of characters. Previous books, at least the four I'd read) featured either first person narration or third person strictly limited to one character's point of view and this one character seemed to encounter an absurdist world revolving in which everyone else is oblivious to his quixotic journey. This novel and Delillo's latest suffer from the same malady... many interesting characters are set up and then encounter the same thematic predicament. What I'm getting at is this - it's very hard to believe that four to six characters would follow a theme that revolves around terrorism and Beirut and communist China. I find it impossible to except people on the streets of New York all talking about Beirut and Mao at the same time as a young man in isolation in America thinks of Beirut and Mao while another character sits in a cafe near Beirut speaking of Mao. Delillo's ideas were more concise in White Noise, Libra and Great Jones Street where the world drifted into madness, represented by one characters journey. Here, the world drifts into madness and everybody seems to be talking about it. Mao II is still too great a piece of writing (as Underworld) to give any less than four stars.
Rating:
Summary: Corpses Wired For Sound
Review: The felt power of DeLillo's prose, the bass of the storm, the intensely concentrated recognition-scenes in the corridors of Third World terror, the null domains of Manhattan and Beirut, two cities ravaged by their own modes of iniquity, blight, and cultural devastation, from the faux-iconic pop-artifacts of Warhol's Factory to the scorched earth policies of Middle East cabals. *Mao II* has, strangely, been shuffled aside in the DeLillo corpus, treated as an aberration, a minor work, an off-day, an ill-advised experiment. As in *The Body Artist*, the author seems especially to have written it for himself -- like his writer-surrogate Bill Gray, aloof in his tightly-caulked safehouse, gnarled, diehard, a true artist experimenting till the end, perceiving it all anew. And DeLillo is an expert spectator. He knows how to jumpstart the reader's eye with each sentence, record the synaptic dissonance of individuals at the edge of disquiet, in transitory spaces, in windows of departure, like a snooping harrier throwing its falcon-shadow onto the tower block, a soul built and weathered by the preceding century. And let's face it, *Mao II* is strange territory. The author is pushing hard to bridge the nighted gulf of Third World angst, analyze and dissolve the force-fed media fictions, the sound-bites and simulations, the BBC monotone, the petty moralizing. But throughout, his troubled and troubling characters hold it all together, headstrong, witty, brilliantly in thrall to the chemical lift of DeLillo's lyrical drug (the first 15 pages of this novel, describing a young woman's sojourn into the Sun Moon cult and her subsequent de-programming, is perhaps my favorite of all this author's writing). Chockfull of ambition and in full career, DeLillo narrates what is left for us to consider.... Somewhere between the plastic tautologies of a silkscreened Mao Zedong (c/o Andy Warhol) and the wakening streets of bomb-scarred Beirut, *Mao II* reads like a speculative op-ed piece on the secret life of Thomas Pynchon (who contributes a jacket blurb), but deepens in perspective to encompass the loneliness of all writers, playing games with themselves and their public, addicted to secrecy, manic with espionage, racked by self-doubt -- a vampire in excelsior -- feeling the old virtuosity slip away.... DeLillo's writer-protagonist, Bill Gray, hamstrung by a 20-year work-in-progress that he will never publish, finds himself seeking new paradigms in the hostage-trading black market of Middle East factionalism, in a last-ditch attempt to put his war-machine back on track. Confused? Just read the novel. But *Mao II* was also written in response to the Tom Clancys of the world, using Middle East terrorism as a backdrop for paramilitary potboilers, the suffering and confusion of endangered peoples set against the insipid "patriot games" of Harrison Ford as NATO super-sleuth. DeLillo provides a tactile photomural of the way things "really are," in the tortured banalities of the interrogation-room, the tainted business of shelling and skirmishes and kidnappings, the child-soldier in soccer jersey and face-mask, phasing into the distant Western mythologizing of these scurvy kill-holes.... The central objection to *Mao II* (and most of his early novels) turns on the issue of characterization. By themselves, in roving solitude, DeLillo's creatures are intense and fascinating, providing a unique and often riveting outlook on our dazed and pretzelled epoch. But once they start to congregate, to cluster in twos and threes, the dialogue becomes surreal, histrionic, and overwritten, top-heavy with artifice and authorial intervention. Suddenly these sparkling personalities become little more than flamboyant glove-puppets soliloquizing the author's rhythmic prose-poetry (read his play, *Valparaiso*, for an undistilled example of this). Rather than speak *to* each other, they seem to drift into parallel monologues, each telepathically prescient of what the other is saying, *becoming* each other, finishing each other's thoughts, paring down images and ideas like Socratic counterparts speaking via satellite. Now, granted, dialogue like this may *occasionally* transpire in real life, and since it is the novelist's job to *select* momentous vectors in the history of the world for perfection and representation, we might see fit to fold our hands and suspend our pedestrian disbelief, but.... BUT.... I feel underqualified to defend the author's willful, er, "plasticity" here. I recognize it, it makes me uncomfortably aware of the text qua text, but with the exception of his earlier work I'm not prepared to denounce it as frailty or weakness. Sure, the characters in *White Noise*, *Libra*, and *Mao II* are often elaborate cartoons, postmodern scribbles, jerry-rigged nonentities, but somehow the strength of these novels has never abated for me. The text still hits me hard. Either DeLillo has become bored with point-blank mimesis, or else is attempting a strange and benighted agon with the Platonic dialogue, giving us unreal (or superreal), abstract characters whose words spiral up into the fiber-optic acumen of the Zeitgeist. Bill, Scott, Karen, Brita, George, and the rest. Are they avatars of world-history or corpses wired for sound? Representative (wo)men or literary wallpaper? Concentrations of world-history or animatronic meat puppets? The text is out there -- the jury must decide for themselves.
Rating: 
Summary: Wow, that was dull
Review: The second star is for the obvious intelligence on display and for DeLillo's mordant, incisive commentaries on post-modern society. But I must echo other reviewers complaints: this tedious narrative went nowhere and seemed to go out of its way to alienate the reader with obscure themes and unengaging characters. Every character thinks and speaks in the same voice; they are merely instruments for DeLillo's editorial content and do not resemble any homo sapiens I've met. I enjoyed White Noise and won't give up on DeLillo yet, but this one did nothing for me.
Rating:
Summary: I like DeLillo, but...
Review: These reviews are for people who are not familiar with DeLillo, because anyone who is familiar with his work only reads these to affirm their own opinion. Having said that, I will say that we are placed under great pressure to READ DeLillo, owing mainly to the fact that he wins awards and is worshipped by the literary establishment. Some people buy DeLillo in the same way they buy wine; too bad bookstores don't have bags that read, DELILLO INSIDE. Mao II is full of beautiful aphorisms and phrases and literary terms that one might as well call hooks, or licks, or riffs. They're on every page, and they keep me reading, but it's understood that I'm reading them just to see the words on the page. The fact is that DeLillo writes about situations and themes with considerable intellectual weight, and he uses his characters' dialogue as a vehicle (sidecar?) for his own narrative. Consequently, DeLillo will introduce you to characters who are totally indistinguishable from one another, and who speak dialogue that no human has ever spoken or will ever speak. This will annoy readers of other authors who are capable of conveying a sense of weight and consequence in their writing, while developing distinct characterizations. Reviewers of writers like DeLillo love to insult people who do not like his books - they try to paint such people as unsophisticated rubes who are better off reading Grisham. I say, stick to your instincts. If you like books about characters who do things to cause the narrative adapt to them, do not buy DeLillo. If you don't mind characters whose verbosity would annoy even the guy waiting on the movie line with Woody Allen in Annie Hall, buy DeLillo.
Rating:
Summary: Reread and Re-Enjoyed This Modern Classic
Review: This fascinating novel probes the connection between isolation and mass movements in the modern world. In doing so, DeLillo is intensely personal, creating memorable characters who are visually and emotionally there, on the page, in full brilliance and confusion. He also employs sublime writing, which captures experiences, images, or ideas of individual isolation or mass movements and then juxtaposes them, showing weird but profound connections. My favorite pages are 149-153, where DeLillo describes New York City's Tompkins Square in the early nineties. Then, drug abusers, the mentally ill, and the homeless turned this lovely neighborhood square into a shambling, threatening shantytown. If you missed it, DeLillo has saved the moment. The central figure in this book is Bill Gray, an isolated writer with a wide and discerning following. Anyone who wants to write might ponder two of his insights: "Writing is bad for the soul when you get right down to it. It protects your worst tendencies." (page198); or, "It was the writing that caused his life to disappear." (page 215).
Rating:
Summary: Maybe DeLillo's Best Work
Review: This is a younger, cooler DeLillo than his more recent work. Personally I think it is his best book. It is in my mind the most creative of his work. It is incredible to see such a unique approach to writing. It is like reading a poem with its lyrical riffs but it has a plot that matters. The weakest facet of the book is that the dialogue often sounds false. Hearing DeLillo characters speak to each other is like listening to jazz -- not about exploring the realistic mind but the deeper surrealistic mind. These characters are bigger than reality. These particular people in this book have a charm that I don't think DeLillo ever again captured. This book is beautiful and about something that actually matters. While Creative Writing degrees muddle the pool of talent in much the same way that expansion teams in baseball lessened the overall talent on each MLB team, writing about something that matters to the world is quite an act of courage. It is wonderful to see a book that creates its own artistic terms and abides by them while sizzling the senses with creativity and wit. Also, what is superior about this book -- if you are considering which DeLillo book to read -- is that it is not that long. It is as self-indulgent as Underworld in style but it is more tightly woven and thus, in my opinion, a much better book. Simply, it is a quicker read.
At this time in our history this book is useful to understand the emotional side to terror, the conformist mind, power, politics and self-respect. DeLillo was way ahead of his time this way. While many Americans blindly support the war on terror you have a thoughtful analysis of why terror exists at all, written way before Bin Laden turned against the US. Mao II is a great introduction to DeLillo.
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