Mao II by Don DeLillo

"There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated."

Mao II opens with a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium among the followers of the Reverend Moon. The Moonies seem like a strange historical footnote to us now, but in DeLillo's version, they are the key to much of the 21st century--the age of the crowd. In the scene, two cynical middle-aged parents search for their daughter among a thousand brides, griping and sniping at each other, blaming each other for their daughter's mad choice. When the slippery point-of-view finds, as the parents cannot, the daughter in the crowd, she is on the cusp of ecstasy. Her new husband is another face in the crowd, a handsome-enough Korean, but what really matters is not just that the two are united, but they all are united, under the aegis of the Reverend Moon. In the crowd, they participate in him, they become a whole.

It seems a little like it has nothing to do with the rest of the book, which is about a reclusive writer named Bill Gray. More Pynchon than DeLillo, Gray lives with his loyal assistant Scott and his young paramour Karen, who is also Scott's paramour--and the woman getting married at Yankee Stadium. Their precarious stability is interrupted by the arrival of a photographer, who is meant to take the first pictures of Bill in many years. This is the beginning of Bill's reintroduction to the wider world, and the next step is a strange one: his publisher asks him to perform a public reading of the work of a poet who's recently been captured by terrorists in Lebanon. Bill agrees (why?), but the spurious logic of the reading is quickly supplanted by another, which leads Bill closer and closer to Beirut and to taking place, symbolically or perhaps literally, the place of the captive.

What does the Reverend Moon have to do with terrorism? What does it have to do with Ayatollah Khomeini, or Chairman Mao, who appears in the novel only in the form of Warhol's titular silkscreen, a face repeated again and again, in many shades. What interests DeLillo is the crowd, the mass, as in the literal bolus of humanity that grows ever wider and larger, and as in mass media, which envelops into the crowd even those who are not physically present. I was struck by the paragraph above, in which Bill tells the photographer that there is a similarity between novelists and terrorists: both are crowd-workers, stoking the primeval subconscious, working into a mass movement. For DeLillo, the end of the 20th century is marked by the turn from culture to violence, or violence as culture. It's a prescient book, not least because the scenes in New York City seem to be stalked by the presence of the twin towers, twenty years before they reached the heights of their symbolic synthesis with mass terror.

Here's what really interested me about Mao II: the second half, as Bill moves ever closer toward Beirut, operates on a plane of logic than only DeLillo can really make work. It's not dream logic, or even symbolic logic; it's the logic of the crowd, which moves toward an expression of unity. Bill, injured and sick, seems to take on the qualities of the dimly-viewed captive the closer he gets. His movement is mirrored by that of Karen, who, in Bill's absence, has taken up with a homeless tent camp in New York's Tompkins Square Park. Karen, we understand, has returned from isolation with Bill into her true home, the crowd. Tompkins Square is another Yankee Stadium. But there's a resonance, too, with what Bill is experiencing, moving toward and through a disorder that is not really disorder, that has an underlying logic that can only be expressed in the crowd.

"It's like Beirut," Karen overhears people saying about the city's growing disorder. She hears it so much it becomes like a chant, a mantra. And as Bill moves toward the actual Beirut, it makes one wonder what Beirut really is. Is it a place? Or it something larger, an expression of the crowd that can expand and contract and take in a community half a world a way? That's the logic of terrorism, isn't it, to open up the circle of suffering, the circle of consciousness, to take in those who would rather stay outside of it? I was really fascinated by these sections, which contain some of (from what I have read) DeLillo's most abstract but deeply compelling writing.