Mao II

Mao II is a novel by Don DeLillo, and no, it’s probably not as good as White Noise. Which puzzles me. Wikipedia tells me DeLillo has written 15 novels. White Noise was his 9th, and Mao his 11th. A writer with a limited body of work doesn’t give you a large enough data set to plot a trend-line; for instance, F Scott Fitzgerald might have completely outdone Gatsby if he’d kept producing. But DeLillo’s been consistent, and has established an impressive oeuvre over the years, which means we can chart his trajectory and have a pretty good sense of his development as an artist. And, considering it, I have to say that craft alone won’t suffice.

Because the DeLillo of Mao is a better writer than the DeLillo of Noise. The clunky overreaches and on-the-nose prose of White Noise have largely been exterminated, though writerly “Look at me, I’m Making Art!” sentences still crop up with distracting regularity.* DeLillo is an author I second-guess more than most; a lot of times I’ll read a sentence, and then do a quick mental revision, and imagine the paragraph without the offending sentence. I rarely feel like anything is lost. But forget about the occasional superfluity — the dude really can write. He’s got a knack for the unexpected but true, the sort of phrasing that makes you question your reaction, only to discover that something’s resonating. It’s writing which betrays none of its inner workings or seams.

And the themes are as on-point as anything in White Noise. DeLillo’s status as one of The Guys in American letters has been questioned by critics as trenchant as James Woods, but I think he belongs in the pantheon by virtue of his unerring sense of our society and its drift. The man has his finger on the pulse of America, really, and you can see it both in White Noise and in Mao II, two novels that could very easily have been published this year, they maintain such relevance. Where White Noise was a postmodernist wail about the dangers of mass culture, Mao II engages terrorism (as well as the dangers of mass culture).

Then what’s the problem? Great writing, relevant material… but a low-velocity plot. Here’s the outline: reclusive writer Bill Skansey written two great books. His third’s been finished for years, but he’s withholding it for fear of the public’s reaction. Bill sees the novelist as an irrelevant profession — they just can’t shape mass consciousness anymore. Who can? Terrorists. That’s the B plot: a young Swiss poet is kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut by a terrorist group. How do they fit together? Well, they don’t. Not really. But DeLillo tries to ram them together anyway, and seems to recognize just how incongruous they are, but makes almost no effort to reconcile it for the reader. Here’s a for instance. A spokesman for the terrorists, George, tries to sell Bill on coming to Athens. This (edited) dialogue follows:

“Of course I’ve asked myself what you have to gain by traveling to Athens under circumstances that might be called[...] shadowy… I’ve asked myself, Why would he say yes? What does he have to gain?”

“And what’s your answer?”
“You have nothing to gain. There is no guarantee of accomplishing the slightest thing. There is only risk.”

Bill goes anyway. DeLillo thumbs his nose at the reader’s need for motivated characters, here, but he’s not doing it out of spite. Mao II is a self-aware book, and Bill especially gets to take shortcuts since he knows, in some respect, that he’s fictional. It’s fine, I guess, but it doesn’t cohere in such a way to make the hand-waving of Bill’s decision less galling. Writers and Terrorists never really come together, and DeLillo doesn’t blow your mind with the back half of the book. Whereas White Noise had an amazing unity of purpose, Mao II is a book divided. DeLillo wants to talk about writers and terrorism. Problem is, he wants to talk about them in the same breath.

*Can you find which sentence I don’t like?

She goes inside and finds a bottle of Midori liqueur. She can hardly believe there is such a thing. She has seen it advertised at airports and convention centers, the walk-through places of the world, but never thought it was mroe than a gesture, a billboard that rides the skyline in streaming light. And now she finds an actual bottle of the stuff in someone’s abandoned flat. Where else but here? Everybody’s nowhere.