Mao II

Mao II, published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. It was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. The title is derived from a series of silkscreen prints Andy Warhol made depicting Mao Zedong.

Related Topics:
Don DeLillo - PEN/Faulkner Award - 1992 - Silkscreen - Andy Warhol - Mao Zedong

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It concerns a reclusive novelist named Bill Gray, who sets off on a mission to gain the freedom of a hostage being held by terrorists in war-torn Beirut.

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Famously camera-shy, Gray accedes to a photographer's wish to make a photo of him for an art project. His years-long effort to complete a new novel has stalled, and he muses that a novelist's work is irrelevant in an age where terrorism has supplanted art as the "raids on consciousness" that jolt the culture at large. Finding that the real world has obviated his ability (and, seemingly, his desire) to create fiction, Gray decides to accept the strange opportunity to travel to Lebanon in an attempt to get a political hostage released.

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The plot unfolds with DeLillo's customary shifts of time, setting, and character.

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In predicting an age of terror in which "the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings," DeLillo seems eerily ahead of his time in contemplating the profound effect that political terror was soon to have on American society.

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