how lovely is a novel that strikes right through the heart? a bit of glass lodged in the hand, relentless in its stinging.
i will spare you any plot details of don delillo's book so you can walk into the text blind. it'd been a while since i read a novel front-to-back in such a voracious way. it may have been an extension of a sort of ego-project, after my friend nick had told me that a draft of my feature screenplay was delillo-like in its approach to character interactions, institutional intrigue and the bizarre spaces that belie american life i had already decided i should probably check some of this stuff out. when another friend zach (plus roommate. hi pull-quote author) mentioned that my description of another feature screenplay project of mine that i had workshopped in high school seemed to share themes with "mao ii," i realized i owned the book and dug into it.
it's a little scary and cathartic to read the work of someone who could see right through me. in another life, i might have been the scott to delillo's bill. what curt, beautiful prose. what fun navigation through space. what tremendous renderings of pain and alienation. even its engagement with orientalist imagery (something that always intrigued me in a twisty-turny sort of way) triggered dormant sentiments on how *i* was perceived in the western imagination. in its most dehumanizing, abstracted sense... there is something productive and "solid" in the novel's construction of frenzied masses.
for a few days, i resisted finishing the last 30 or so pages of "mao ii." it felt wrong to complete in such a short amount of time. the voraciousness with which i swallowed up each word, each syllable was disturbing to me. i also just did not want the damn thing to be over. but when all my roommates went to the starbucks down the street, i took the book with me. at a table next to us, a customer who seemed lightly aggravated asked their tablemate: "you don't have a definition of art? how do you know you see art when you come across it?" no answer was really satisfactory for them. more requests for elaboration, more relentless interrogation: "but that's a circular definition, how do you define art without that? sure, you 'know it when you see it,' but how do you even see it if you don't have a definition?" the two left. taylor swift, sara bareilles, john mayer-core blasted on the starbucks radio. i finished "mao ii." it was perfect.