MAO II

Don DeLillo is a novelist of ideas, and Mao II is satisfyingly stacked with them, narrative building blocks of notions about identity, celebrity, alienation, love, terror, and the writing life. The characters are eccentric but persuasive, especially the central and most difficult character, Bill Gray, a famous and famously reclusive writer whose inability to finish his novel has created a private crisis that works to force him out of hiding. Michael Prichard's voice has an odd quacking timbre, but he reads with intelligence and understanding, a very good match for this cool, hard, masculine material. B.G. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/MAY 01]