Set the Controls

Reading Don DeLillo’s acclaimed novel Mao II more than a decade after 9-11 and some 20 years since the book was written leaves one thankful that the projected literary apocalypse is yet to be realized, but still in awe of how DeLillo foretold the degree to which terrorism would subsume art in the collective mindset beneath a ceaseless stream of news.

The premise of the novel is that “the future belongs to crowds” and that the freestanding individual stands little chance of survival outside the safety of security in numbers. It’s a dangerous and deadly world DeLillo constructs, but an accurate reflection of our rapidly unified world, even more so in 2011 perhaps than in 1991 when the book was written. In the early 1990s the global dichotomy of the collective versus the market remained intact, with a cauldron of regional and religious fervor serving as the stew in which ideology sustained itself. DeLillo masterfully blends the flavor of the age, mixing a critical eye toward the totalitarian victory over socialism, the already decayed underbelly of the West and America in particular, the pandemonium of emerging Islamic extremism and the primacy of the Chinese monolith.

To capture this all in one slim 240 page novel is the accomplishment of a master.

The story is based on a reclusive writer, Bill Gray, his devoted friend Scott who attaches himself to Bill and his ideas after reading his early works, Scott’s girlfriend Karen and a talented photographer Brita who has come to capture Bill’s portrait for posterity.

In the vehicle of these four characters, aided by two secondary actors, DeLillo crisscrosses the postmodern mindset in dialogue, interior monologue, action and reflection.

Karen has slipped the grasp of the Moonie cult only to be picked up in a small Iowa town by Scott who is on his own journey to find the reclusive Bill, whose novels have lit an intellectual fire in his otherwise aimless post-college years as he wandered the globe an American of means without meaning.

The pair has settled down in Bill’s reclusive cabin somewhere within a day’s driving distance of New York City. Bill has accepted Scott as his secretary, freeing the artist from the daily demands of domestic life, which his two failed marriages and strained relationships with his adult children prove he is not cut out for. Brita, an artistic photographer who has devoted her life to capturing writers on film, comes to take a hand at diving into Bill’s reality with her camera, lenses and questions.

As the story unfolds, Brita has sparked a renewed desire to engage life within Bill and he embarks on a quest, at the behest of a publisher, to meet with the representative of a Lebanese terrorist group that has taken an unknown Swedish poet hostage. The layout of this plot twist is not at all contrived as it may seem at first glance and DeLillo effortlessly gets Bill moving toward his ultimate end somewhere on the road to Beirut.

The timing of all these moving parts is masterfully done. Somewhere in conversation in London with a representative of the terror group there is a wonderful conversation where Bill and the character, George, reveal DeLillo’s emphasis. The premise is that technology, communication and the ever shrinking distances between humans across the globe has given the terrorist new power to hold the masses transfixed by their acts, dominating their attention and molding the post-modern mind to their whim. Bill’s lament is that this was and should remain the job of the artist, the poet, the writer, and most of his motivation in the book is to arrive at the source of this terror power and confront it in his own way.

But just as so many individuals in both east and west try to hide their flaws and minimize attention paid to their failures by losing themselves within the crowd, so too is Bill running from his flaws and the failure of his own body.

Like many novels – Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift come to mind – in the end the wondering protagonist dies alone while the young and the chaser of beauty are left to carry on the human struggle.

DeLillo’s characters may be a bit too thinly cast for some readers, but the style and poetry of language easily carry the mind from page to page and across scenes and ideas. In the end of Mao II it is the photographer Brita, half dressed on an apartment balcony in the predawn hours waving at a marriage procession in the street below as it is escorted through the battle zone of Beirut by a tank and a jeep with a machine-gun mount that leaves us with the sense that humanity, while violent, irrational and overwhelmed by uncertainty, remains at its base about love and the gentleness of human interaction.