Mao II by Don DeLillo
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Novelist as Substitute Terrorist (Or the other way round?)

I have a great deal of sympathy for DeLillo's protagonist, Bill Gray, alias Willard Skansey Jr. He has my fear of being over the hill. He, like me, talks to relative strangers more intimately than is warranted. I share his doubt that any of my accomplishments have even personal importance. And I really would prefer to spend my remaining days being ignored by the world.

On the other hand, Bill puts me off viscerally. His clipped conversational banter packed with urbane wit, his hapless set-up of his own professional and existential demise, his absence of credible motives for any actions he takes, his weird idea that the rise of terrorism has reduced the moral power of writers of fiction, and his compulsion to do something about that - all of it is alien and contrived. I'm left cold and unmoved in any direction.

There are many captivating phrases. This is DeLillo after all. But some appear to be nonsense: "We understand how reality is invented. A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds out into the world. Every thought is permitted. And there's no longer a spatial distinction between thinking and acting." Is this a philosophy? A new understanding of the world? Or just a novelist's novelistic hubris?

Other of DeLillo's quips read like they came from Pseuds Corner in Private Eye Magazine: "... when the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith?... When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottle tops." He also very much likes to bite the hand that feeds him, particularly that of publishers: "The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless." Indeed, that threat of the powerful writer must keep them up at night at Penguin.

The narrator's snobbishness is obvious:

"They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fuelled by credulousness. They speak half a language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorised and passed on ... This is what people have wanted since consciousness became corrupt."

Who is it, does one suppose, DeLillo is addressing? Not his readers surely. More likely the unread masses, at least those not having read DeLillo, including all those dead folk born after corruption but before the DeLillian Enlightenment .

And of course, authors don't fair much better. "If you've got the language of being smart, you'll never catch a cold or get a parking ticker or die," says his sarcastic protagonist who has a houseful of notes, drafts, proofs, corrections, and emendations of a book he refuses to finish for no clear reason. He's a lush, a lech, and an absent father who sleeps with his assistant's wacky Moonie girlfriend and thinks that having his photograph taken is equivalent to a notice of impending death. His apparent intention is to allow Lebanese terrorists to 'trade-up' on their literary captive Swiss poet by sacrificing himself. His life, as they say, is complicated. Mostly because his egotism appears unbounded.

References to Mao, Arafat, and Khomeini abound. I can't understand why. Are these the terrorists who have undermined the importance of Western fiction? If they have, does this imply that authors are compelled to involve themselves in terrorist liaisons and media-manipulation? "Great leaders regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns," notes one of the characters. And? Are great novelists included as great leaders? Someone involved with this novel apparently thinks such a pretentious conceit has merit. Good luck with that.

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