Mao II

by Don DeLillo

Overview

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and The Silence, a profound novel about art, terror, masses, and the individual from "one of the most intelligent, grimly funny voices to comment on life in present-day America" (The New York Times)

Bill Gray, a famous, reclusive novelist, emerges from his isolation when he becomes the key figure in an event staged to force the release of a poet hostage in Beirut. As Bill enters the world of political violence, a nightscape of Semtex explosives and hostages locked in basement rooms, Bill's dangerous passage leaves two people stranded: his brilliant, fixated assistant, Scott, and the strange young woman who is Scott's lover—and Bill's.

An extraordinary novel from Don DeLillo about words and images, novelists and terrorists, the mass mind and the arch-individualist, Mao II explores a world in which the novelist's power to influence the inner life of a culture now belongs to bomb-makers and gunmen. Mao II is the work of an ingenious writer at the height of his powers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140152746
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/1992
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	149,793
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.65(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise, and Libra. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize. The Angel Esmeralda was a finalist for the 2011 Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2012, DeLillo received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for his body of work.

Hometown:

Westchester County, New York

Date of Birth:

November 20, 1936

Place of Birth:

New York City

Education:

Fordham University, 1958

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This novel's a beauty. A vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing" —Thomas Pynchon

The writing is dazzling; the images, so radioactive that they glow afterward in our minds." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Mao II: 

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

"The writing is dazzling; the images, so radioactive that they glow afterward in our minds." 
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"If Don DeLillo has not yet been canonized as the leading American novelist, it will happen. The man is brilliant and daring . . . and Mao II is one of his best books." 
—The Washington Post Book World

"This novel's a beauty . . . DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond the official versions of our daily history, behind all easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing." 
—Thomas Pynchon

"A mordantly funny, casually prescient, hypnotically condensed novel . . . It is short, loosely plotted but simultaneously tight as a drum . . . Mao II goes beyond the easy tack of offering art as some humanistic antidote to terror, and instead delineates their uneasy commonalities." 
—Granta

From the Publisher

Disturbing, provocative and darkly comic, Mao II reads, at once, as a sociological meditation on the perils of contemporary society, and as a kind of new-wave thriller....The writing, as usual, is dazzling; the book's images, so radioactive that they glow afterward in our minds. -- New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Each of DeLillo's previous nine novels (White Noise; Libra; etc.) has been a tour de force. This newest work is another remarkable achievement. It is almost as if DeLillo's words have value apart from the story they recount; sentences chill, scenes amaze, chapter endings reverberate, and the reader is transfixed. A reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, is drawn back into the world by acts of terrorism and by the visit of a woman who has come to photograph him for her ongoing and endless project to capture the images of the world's authors. Gradually, the novel, dense but accessible, concerns itself with the inevitable conflict between the power of the crowd and the power of the individual. Which is the motor of the world: The novelist, who may write alone in his room and yet affect masses? The terrorist, who is an individual working in concert with a larger movement which he may or may not control? The "master'' who controls masses? (The lover of Gray's assistant has been a Moonie: the opening scene, a mass wedding, is a brilliant set piece). The beauty of DeLillo's prose enlivens such seemingly dry questions. Mao II reconfirms DeLillo's status as a modern master and literary provocateur.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This extraordinary story focuses on one Bill Gray, a reclusive writer whose legend abounds while he slowly deteriorates from drinking, drugs, and depression. His assistant Scott keeps his image alive yet mysterious. "Years ago there were stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba, Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word. . . . . Now Bill was devising his own cycle of death and resurgence. It made Scott think of great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns. Mao Zedong of course.'' Enter Brita Nilsson, photographer of writers and terrorists, who captures Bill's likeness on film for the first time in more than three decades and pushes him to publish his last great novel. Publisher Charlie gives Bill a PR offer he can't refuse, and the story concludes on the violent streets of Beirut. DeLillo's style is wonderfully expressive yet dark in tone. Readers will thoroughly enjoy it. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/91.-- Kevin M. Roddy, Oakland P.L., Cal.

Library Journal