Mao II

"And isn't it the novelist, Bill, above all people, above all writers, who knows in his soul how the terrorist thinks and feels?"

You have a twisted sense of the writer’s place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. 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.

Don DeLillo
Mao II

The terrorist has replaced the novelist. This is the conclusion that Don DeLillo comes to in his tenth novel Mao II. Directly after his ninth, Libra, which was a fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald and the multi-organizational hit on JFK. What is that to Don DeLillo besides the greatest American novel ever written?

“Think of two parallel lines,” he said. “One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of self. It’s not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It is a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.

Don DeLillo
Libra

The novelist Bill Gray has become a recluse for the last thirty years. There hasn’t even been a photo of him. Is he alive? Is he dead? No one knows. He has been working on a novel all those years. The novel is finished yet he continues to work on it. He has to change the punctuation, commas are very important to writers.

A young Swiss doctor who published a couple of poems is being held by a terrorist organization in Beirut. There are none of the classic links to any Zionist or Muslim organizations. It is like he is being held hostage & tortured because he is innocent. The only narrative the good people are concerned with is the constructed reality of mass media. The Swiss poet’s freedom depends on Bill Gray announcing he will be freed. If the image of reality is not held in the mind of the media then they are all easter eggs waiting to be found. Real life must come under the scrutiny of fiction to be considered real.

The only problem is that Bill Gray is a hostage himself. He is being taken care of by a super-fan called Scott who tracked him down & forced himself into the role of his assistant. Scott takes care of his day-to-day living which further isolates Bill from the world. They are joined by Karren Jenny, a former member of the Unification church who was married to a man she barely knew in a group ceremony overseen by the Master, Kim Jo Pak. The fact that everyone is experiencing the private emotions of marriage in a vast public setting implies that the system trumps the individual. Karen sleeps with Scott. She sometimes sleeps with Bill. A photographer who photographs only writers says it’s weird but they all belong together.

Bill has become Mao Ze Dong. Devising his own cycle of death & resurgence. They are pronounced dead. They are proclaimed senile. Obviously, they are too sick to run a country or write a novel. Then they take a nine-mile swim in the Yangtze River at seventy-two or rescue a Swiss poet while smiling and appearing godlike.

If Bill actually publishes his novel he is finished. What sustains him is the idea that he could sweep out of nowhere with the great novel. The reader has become a follower of Mao, they need a figure they can believe in. They don’t care what he believes they just need one figure that has stood the test of time. Who cares how silly it is, can’t you see this man has grown fruitful and multiplied?

Bill believes the writer has gone soft. It was their duty and joy to patrol the desert highway roads made out of the bones of other writers. It was their mission to raid the inner life of the culture. Now that job is performed by gunmen and bombmakers. The writer has incorporated, married, white picket fence with the blond wife and golden retriever. The terrorist by his profession has the blessing of being unincorporable.

In order to prove that the writer still has some edge, Bill leaves his Stockholm family & performs acrobatic feats of counter-logic to prove that writers still have cajones. In today’s world, the only thing that can guarantee eyeballs are those strange people who are still willing to die for their beliefs. The novel ends with the mystical leader of the Beirut terrorist organization proclaiming in a war-torn apartment, can’t you see the great work I’ve begun to write?