Review: Mao II

Mao II by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book seven or eight times, and I long ago decided it’s a modern masterpiece, but – as I read it yet again for a class – it feels fresh yet again.

If you’ve never read DeLillo and want to start, I think this is the one to begin with. It’s less ambitious than Underworld, but then so is almost everything else. I find White Noise vastly overrated; I didn’t enjoy it in its time when it was cutting edge enough to explore the early implications of image-is-everything postmodernism. Now, with that phenomenon old news, I think that book is even less interesting.

In contrast, Mao II is a book that seems to stay new, that seems to reveal new insights as we move ever deeper into the dystopic future DeLillo saw more than 25 years ago.

As I like to put it, this is probably the best post 9/11 novel I know of, even though it was written a decade before the disaster. It must have been eerie in the 1990s to read the reflections of terror that he wrapped around the image of the Twin Towers; from this vantage, it’s all the more striking. In a novel that talks about the nature of the future – as a time when crowds overwhelm the capacity of the individual and when terrorists encroach on the imaginative authority of the novelist – it’s all the more striking to see it after the fact.

There is a bit of woe-is-the-author self-pity that animates this – something I can’t help finding a bit funny as I re-read it and think of DeLillo bemoaning his own late-middle-age fate – but I forgive it. There’s so much skill, I have to write it off as a rare joke from one of our least humorous great writers.

What most compels me on this reading, though, is that we live in a moment where terrorists really are trying to wrest narrative authority from our writers. Our President’s cries of “fake news” are an unsubtle effort (one disturbingly successful) to assert that he, and he along, has the power to narrate experience to us. That’s often consisted of his self-aggrandizement and boasting – sometimes crassly harmless and sometimes dangerous for its justification of harmful policy. In this moment of election campaigning, though, his narrative has become a drumbeat of fear. Today it’s his imagining of a caravan of miserable refugees as something worthy of a military deployment. Tomorrow it will be something else.

But at bottom it will always be about stoking fear, about exaggerating a threat so that, to those inclined toward him, he can exaggerate his own power to defend.

And, of course, the fear he unleashes has the power to hurt in directions he cannot control. It’s barely a week since the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, but I can’t help seeing DeLillo’s prognostication in effect. The gunmen – and the mail bomber barely two days before – were working to make real the story our President is telling. They wanted to bring into the real world the terror born of his fantasy.

Mao II is more sophisticated than anything so simple, but its bedrock question still resonates. When the terrorists determine they will shape the consciousness of the world with their violence, what place is there for the writer? If you know the end of this, the answer is a very bleak one.


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