As I've said before, I like Don DeLillo. What I admire about him most is his ability to naturally incorporate arcane points of critical theory and philosophy into his work. The caveat for reading DeLillo, however, is that he (unlike, say, Calvino) is perfectly willing to let his ideas completely overshadow his characters.

There's the voice issue, too. As time goes on, DeLillo seems to have found a kind of flat banter that all his characters share, a voice that it seems only logical to conclude is not entirely dislike his own.

DeLillo novel: A novel in which all the characters sit around talking as if they're in a DeLillo novel.

Perhaps not unrelatedly, DeLillo is a writer whose early work is generally considered better than his later.

But I'm shooting BBs at a giant.

Mao II's principal figure is a writer, which suggests a certain kind of self-consciousness novel (almost precisely of the type that this one is). The best part of the novel, for my money, are the periodic digressions into deep thought--of which there are many. But the novel has the same deeply felt millennial ennui that we expect from DeLillo--the idea that here, at what we collectively identify as the end of history, we have no idea how to live.

This novel isn't not the mindbender that White Noise is, and not as much fun as the Oswald-themed Libra. But it's not the masturbatory Underworld or Cosmopolis, either. It's a DeLillo novel of the middling sort--which means it's worth reading.

One quote:

"For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."
"Interesting. How so?"
"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."
"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."