Harold Bloom, the nation's top literary critic and Sterling Professor at Yale, groups Don DeLillo with Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Phillip Roth as the best writers in America today, and after reading my third DeLillo tome - Mao II - it is hard to argue with that assessment. (Bloom worth checking out - read this column skewering hacks like Stephen King and JK Rowling.) I was first introduced to DeLillo with Underworld, and if you aren't familiar with that book and it's reputation and influence, I would wholeheartedly recommend giving it a go - it will be one of the few books published in the last 25 years that will be required reading a hundred years from now. Mao II is not a sprawling, thousand page postmodern epic like Underworld, but in it's own way it is just as powerful.
The plot revolves around a reclusive Salinger/Pynchon type, the aptly named Bill Gray, and his desire to escape his latest, failed novel. A photo shoot, his first ever, with a fetching photographer obsessed with his books brings about a crises of conscience in the writer, and he descends into a world of political violence, kidnappings, and terrorism. Like his other works, the plot is a loop. We open with a Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and close with a tank-ushered Beirut wedding. A literary palindrome. But the novel revolves around crowds, images, and collective consciousness. In fact, the prologue's last sentence is "The future belongs to crowds."
It is hard to argue with that assessment, and Gray, who we can only assume is a thinly veiled DeLillo, spends a good deal of the novel pontificating and ruminating - quite eloquently - on just that. We have throngs attending Khomeni's funeral, throngs of homeless in New York City, throngs of soccer hooligans crushed to death, throngs of corpses at various terrorist attacks, peppered throughout the novel to illustrate just how meaningless the individual has become in modern society. A kidnapped Swiss poet provides the engine for Gray's foray into terrorism. Gray agrees to travel to London for a poetry reading on behalf of the kidnapped poet, held in Beirut, but a bomb threat postpones the reading and Gray finds himself inexorably pulled towards the Middle East to negotiate the poet's release, via Athens and Cyprus.
Delillo's prose is ridiculous. It is easy to bask in his sentence structure and wordplay, alone worth the price of the novel. However, it is the substance of the novel's message which make it a classic. Terrorism has replaced art. It has hijacked the collective consciousness, become the only meaningful art. The writer is dead. "The novel used to feed our search for meaning," says Gray, our only form of "secular transcendence." But we have been pushed, collectively, "toward something larger, darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere . . . we don't need the novel . . . we don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need reports and predictions and warnings." This was written before 9/11, by the way. The writer's place in society has been usurped by terrorists - "The state should want to kill all writers . . . every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere." Of course, now terrorists are hunted, their ideas threaten power. Gray's thirst to taste that romance and leverage terrorist wield now, stolen from his pen, leads to his downfall. Of course the plot itself mirrors this ideology - Brita, the photographer that spurs Gray's venture out into the world at the beginning of the novel, has abandoned her obsession of writers and embraced terrorists by the end of the novel.
Yeah, I spent my last post bitching about politics my last post and here I am devouring maybe the most political novel I have read since All The King's Men, but the writing and the message in this book are simply too powerful to pass up. The world we live in today, constantly connected, constantly and instantly "analyzed, and relentlessly documented and dissected- this is the world Delillo is scared of, and it is here. Definitely a book worth reading.
The plot revolves around a reclusive Salinger/Pynchon type, the aptly named Bill Gray, and his desire to escape his latest, failed novel. A photo shoot, his first ever, with a fetching photographer obsessed with his books brings about a crises of conscience in the writer, and he descends into a world of political violence, kidnappings, and terrorism. Like his other works, the plot is a loop. We open with a Moonie wedding at Yankee Stadium, and close with a tank-ushered Beirut wedding. A literary palindrome. But the novel revolves around crowds, images, and collective consciousness. In fact, the prologue's last sentence is "The future belongs to crowds."
It is hard to argue with that assessment, and Gray, who we can only assume is a thinly veiled DeLillo, spends a good deal of the novel pontificating and ruminating - quite eloquently - on just that. We have throngs attending Khomeni's funeral, throngs of homeless in New York City, throngs of soccer hooligans crushed to death, throngs of corpses at various terrorist attacks, peppered throughout the novel to illustrate just how meaningless the individual has become in modern society. A kidnapped Swiss poet provides the engine for Gray's foray into terrorism. Gray agrees to travel to London for a poetry reading on behalf of the kidnapped poet, held in Beirut, but a bomb threat postpones the reading and Gray finds himself inexorably pulled towards the Middle East to negotiate the poet's release, via Athens and Cyprus.
Delillo's prose is ridiculous. It is easy to bask in his sentence structure and wordplay, alone worth the price of the novel. However, it is the substance of the novel's message which make it a classic. Terrorism has replaced art. It has hijacked the collective consciousness, become the only meaningful art. The writer is dead. "The novel used to feed our search for meaning," says Gray, our only form of "secular transcendence." But we have been pushed, collectively, "toward something larger, darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere . . . we don't need the novel . . . we don't even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need reports and predictions and warnings." This was written before 9/11, by the way. The writer's place in society has been usurped by terrorists - "The state should want to kill all writers . . . every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere." Of course, now terrorists are hunted, their ideas threaten power. Gray's thirst to taste that romance and leverage terrorist wield now, stolen from his pen, leads to his downfall. Of course the plot itself mirrors this ideology - Brita, the photographer that spurs Gray's venture out into the world at the beginning of the novel, has abandoned her obsession of writers and embraced terrorists by the end of the novel.
Yeah, I spent my last post bitching about politics my last post and here I am devouring maybe the most political novel I have read since All The King's Men, but the writing and the message in this book are simply too powerful to pass up. The world we live in today, constantly connected, constantly and instantly "analyzed, and relentlessly documented and dissected- this is the world Delillo is scared of, and it is here. Definitely a book worth reading.
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