Volume 38, Number 12 · June 27, 1991
History Novel
By Robert Towers
Mao II
by Don DeLillo
Viking, 241 pp., $19.95
Don DeLillo's reputation had been advancing stealthily for more than a decade before the publication of White Noise (1985) and Libra (1989) secured his current position as one of the most original, intelligent, and visionary novelists now writing in America. He had by this time created a distinctive fictional world, a technologically sophisticated place riddled with conspiracy and coded messages, subject at times to bursts of terrorist fire. The 'paranoia' of DeLillo's vision—especially notable in Running Dog and The Names—has something in common with Pynchon's and Burroughs's, but it is less wild, less surreal, far more deeply grounded in the reality made known to us by journalists and intelligence agents testifying at congressional hearings.
Review, 2349 words
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