BOOKS
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years, laboring instead at endless revisions on his "new" novel. Now, as
Brita is brought to his house, Gray has decided
to
step out of the self–
imposed shadows and bare his face to her camera. Brita photographs
only writers because she thinks they may soon vanish and because "the
writer's face is the surface of the work. It's a clue to the mystery inside."
Sharing Bill Gray's country hideaway are Karen, one of the Moonie
brides, who has left the Unification Church but still clings passively to
some tatters of the Master's precepts, and Scott, the self-appointed
acolyte who idolizes Gray's work and tries to bring some order into the
novel's messy existence, which consists mainly of drinking too much and
fidgeting over worthless revisions on the book he has come to loathe
but cannot let go. It has become, for him, a kind of sickness, "a neutered
near-human dragging through the house, hump-backed, hydrocephalic
... dribbling brain £luid from his mouth." He soon gives up on his
writing altogether and, at the urging of his editor, £lies to London to try
to secure the release of a Swiss poet held hostage by Maoist terrorists in
Beirut. Because Bill takes off without leaving any word of his plans or
whereabouts for Karen and Scott, Karen decides to look for him in
New York. In a long and horribly graphic chapter, Karen wanders day
after day through Tompkins Square Park, listlessly trying to do some–
thing for the homeless squatters in their cardboard shantytown. Mean–
while, in London, Bill Gray witnesses a terrorist bombing, has a futile
meeting with a spokesman for the terrorists, and is severely injured in a
street accident. On a ferry taking him from Cyprus to Beirut, he dies
anonymously, his body stripped of identification by a thief.
One important theme of
Mao II
is to be found not in these events,
conveyed as fragmentary vignettes whose place in the book as a whole
never becomes completely clear, but in the conversation Bill Gray has
with Brita while he is being photographed. Gravely demoralized and
depressed, he has come to believe that novels have been drained of all
meaning in the present-day world and that their function has been
appropriated by terrorism:
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 . .. Ycars 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.
And, returning to an idea DeLillo repeatedly aired in
Rlllwing Dog
and
White Noise,
Bill adds: "Because we're giving way to terror, to news of
terror, to tape recorders and cameras . . . to bombs stashed in radios.
