Mao II
Feeney, Mark
literature as in life. "The first task of the novelist," he believes, "...is to create an imaginary social landscape both credible and significant." He favors the great realist writers, who...
...Her latest book is Power Trips and Other Journeys (Wisconsin...
...Narrative has never particularly engaged DeLillo, and the plot here is straightforward enough...
...Even something as bright and familiar as Broadway feels "as if blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted...
...Ultimately, though, there's something hollow about the novel...
...A bit of an anarchist himself, Howe would probably agree with the anarchist, social reformer, and protomodernist Shelley, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of at least a certain sector of humankind--unlike Shelley, he fears the consequences of some of their legislation...
...Everson's organization has reached a tentative agreement with a terrorist group for the release of a young poet being held hostage in Beirut...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 450) ings with housing code violations, HPD must target its efforts toward those buildings with the most serious problems and with the highest probability of success in the courts...
...We did not "drop" the case, as the article alleges...
...Mao H is a book about writers, terrorists, and hostages--menprofessionally located in small rooms---chained to a typewriter, chained to a conspiracy, or chained literally...
...There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists," he muses...
...Maybe that's why I have often found Howe's qualifications of modernism too illuminating of their subject to be entirely convincing arguments against it...
...PICTURES OF BILL GRAY MA0 II Don DeLiilo Viking, $19.95,256 pp...
...Yet in no other DeLillo novel have so many of them filled so many rooms...
...The best virtue of the greatest critics is that they proceed under the power of their own minds...
...It is a sort of honesty...
...Then, since the condition of the building warranted it, HPD initiated a 7A proceeding, which started in December of 1989...
...later a character involved in the wedding finds herself obsessed with the throngs of homeless in the East Village...
...The difference in perspective underscores a difference in the breadth of critical reach...
...The book's protagonist, Bill Gray, is an acclaimed novelist who takes intricate pains to preserve his anonymity...
...More effective as antimodernist statements are his intelligent and eloquent defenses of writers working in a traditional vein, such as his superb essays on Zola and Dreiser...
...andLibra, which took for its subject the one event America has come to regard as its own twentieth-century apocalypse, managed to conclude with a graveside epiphany from Marguerite Oswald...
...As a result of HPD's motion, it was agreed that the decision whether to appoint 9 August 1991:491...
...But that kinship carries with it a patness that trades more on our assumptions about novelists--or, rather, Great Novelists than on what such a strange and terrible individual must actually be like...
...It also feeds into his own growing misgivings with the writer's enterprise...
...Only Thomas Pynchon surpasses him as a master of what one might call the paranoid style in American fiction...
...The court granted the owner several adjournments, during which HPD conducted additional inspections, at one point finding nearly 300 violations in the building...
...For DeLillo, facts have auras, and Bill Gray is only half kidding when he complains, "Nothing happens until it's consumed...
...and even there, it remains little more than a powerful conceit...
...What writers used to do before we were all incorporated...
...He's sixty-three, alternately dismissive of the novel he's been working on for twenty-three years, and terrified at the prospect of publishing it...
...Yet from the packingcase shanties of Tompkins Square to the "millennial image mill" of Beirut, a desperate unease pervades Mao 1I...
...He has crowded his books with solitaries: the math-prodigy hero of Ratner's Star, the reclusive rock-star hero of Great Jones Street, Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, even (briefly) Adolf Hitler immured in his Berlin bunker in Running Dog...
...MARK FEENEY is editor of the Boston Globe's Focus section...
...Those last four words accurately reflect DeLillo's tenth novel, Mao H. Of course, men in small rooms have figured throughout DeLillo's fiction...
...Even paranoids, it would seem, have mutual-admiration societies...
...so it is when a genuine personality strikes words onto the page...
...HPD's inspection immediately prior to the court date showed that of the 172 violations to which the inspectors had access, 142, or 83 percent, had been corrected...
...In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and 490: Commonweal influence...
...In it, "everything" is "a shape, a fate, information flowing...
...Black humor enlivened White Noise' s "airborne toxic event...
...We remained actively involved in monitoring the building, and when a reinspection in September 1990 showed that the owner was not adequately complying with the consent order, we restored the 7A case and the request for a 7A administrator and also requested that contempt penalties be levied against the owner...
...It takes a great novelist to render a Great Novelist...
...This is DeLillo's most personal novel...
...The agreement is to be announced at a London news conference, and Everson has hit upon the media-pleasing idea of having Gray appear at the press event to read a selection of the hostage's poems...
...He favors the great realist writers, who reveal the flesh, blood, and bones of human travails, over the literary modernists, in whose work, "the problematic nature of experience tends to replace the experience of human nature...
...Howe has coined the term "style of brilfiance" to characterize the "free-lance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis" that flew from the pens of the New York writers...
...Mao H has many such bravura observations...
...All the material in every life is channeled into the glow...
...LEE SIEGEL is a free-lance writer living in New York City...
...Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture...
...On the contrary: himself expert in using irony and paradox as critical strategies to liberate the human element from ideological dross, he has grown disillusioned with writers who employ the same strategies to liberate existence from the human element...
...And as for the practical effects of modernists and their work, it was John F. Kennedy, not Hitler or Stalin, who enjoyed reading Malraux's "haughty authoritarianism," as Howe calls it...
...it was Malraux who fought against fascism in Spain and the Nazi armies in France, not Eliot or Yeats who took arms against democracy in Great Britain...
...The connection between terrorists and novelists never exists on other than a purely intellectual level...
...One reads it with constant interest and excitement---excepting Pynchon, no other author sees the way we live now quite so compellingly as DeLillo does--but one also reads it with a growing sense of disappointment...
...Gray surprises both men and agrees to Charlie's proposal...
...Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory...
...Thus, whereas some conservative and Marxist critics alike condemn the modernist writers as amoral aesthetes, Howe finds in them a moral vision he doesn't like...
...Mao H belongs to the latter group...
...shows Howe's modemist roots in the way he overestimates the capacity of modernist imaginations to do harm...
...He is sometimes accused of a lack of sympathy for the modernist style...
...He just keeps adding to what is as impressive a body of fiction as any American novelist has produced over the past twenty years...
...Hyperconsciousness or the loss of self--these are the alternatives Mao H offers...
...Involving himself in Everson's project is a way of escape...
...That said, there exists an artistic imagination and an ethical imagination, and Howe's explorations of the places where they conflict or converge are rare and gratifying occasions in American letters, and sometimes, fruitful provocations...
...DeLillo, who greatly esteems Pynchon's work, has clearly drawn upon him for Bill Gray...
...In mid-1989, when the tenants of 2645 Morris Avenue asked HPD to move for a 7A proceeding, 102 violations were listed against the building, not the "hundreds" stated in the article...
...Esperanto of jet lag" is the sort of brilliant phrase only Don DeLillo might come up with...
...While that number certainly indicates problems in the building, the typical building in which the courts impose 7A administrators literally do have hundreds of violations, in keeping with the legal requirement that this remedy be applied only on finding extreme and lifethreatening situations...
...However, the owner corrected many of the violations by the time the 7A proceeding was finally scheduled for trial in June of 1990...
...In Mao H, we get only the first half of the equation...
...HPD staff met with the tenants that September and reinspected the building (there was no "demonstration" as the article states...
...ROBERT ELLSBERG is editor-in-chief of Orbis Books and a doctoral candidate at Harvard Divinity School...
...His old editor, a man named Charlie Everson, heads a human-rights group...
...DeLillo's fictional world is one charged with menace and meaning...
...one detects an intimate feeling in the writing about Bill Gray and his vocation that is absent from DeLillo's other books...
...The results have been memREVIEWERS JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN is Centennial Professor of political science and professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University...
...Some DeLillo novels have been very funny indeed (End Zone, Great Jones Street, White Noise), while in others laughter would have been very much an alien presence (The Names, Libra...
...It's apocalyptic in a way none of his previous novels has been...
...The misplaced heartland hotel...
...A last remark about Howe's literary presence...
...His own prose is robustly elegant, gracefully sober, swift and lucid, precisely anchored to the object of discrimination...
...so it has been with this immediately recognizable voice, which kindles reasonableness, idealism, and humane feeling in selfish times...
...Hands across the water, the pen is mightier than the sword--and generous publicity for all concerned...
...He doesn't teach, he doesn't tour...
...we assiduously pursued the legal remedies available to us under the law...
...A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut...
...Endings have always been a problem for DeLillo, and Mao H concludes without ever really resolving--Bill's own fate becomes almost incidental...
...DeLillo himself is very much unincorporated...
...That last sentence has an ironic cast...
...Familiar steps strike the ground with the weight of an unmistakable temperament...
...The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory--words that were part of some synthetic mass language, the esperanto of jet lag...
...Given the high rate of correction, the only genuine legal remedy for HPD to pursue was a consent order to correct the remaining violations...
...As against these singledout individuals, there is the equally disturbing spectacle of identityless crowds (the book opens with the famous Moonie mass wedding in Yankee Stadium...
...The fineness of Irving Howe is that in his writing a powerful critical mind draws its independence from an unabashedly stubborn heart...
...Nature has given way to aura...
...If anything, his critique of Eliot and Yeats, Kafka and Lawrence et al...
...Mark Feeney n Don DeLillo's previous novel, Libra, a CIA operative assigned to write the secret history of the Kennedy assassination comes to realize that "his subject is not politics or violent crime but men in small rooms...
...They make raids on human consciousness...
...orable, unsettling, and occasionally hilarious...
...nothing mediates it...
...Yet I hope Howe would concede that the memory of an imaginative truth which was hostile on the page to ordinary experience might help independent spirits breathe when they are on the street...
...In all DeLillo's books an almost medieval sense of immanence collides with a clinical delight in the amassing of data...
...Pynchon, in turn, has contributed one of his rare blurbs to Mao II...
Vol. 118 • August 1991 • No. 14
