The futuristic past

Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991) opens with a scene of a mass wedding in Yankee Stadium. A girl's parents sitting in the bleachers look through their binoculars to find their daughter among the six and a half thousand couples on the field, being group-blessed by their religious leader/marriage officiant. It's a very eerie scene, and for someone who isn't much of a history buff it seems very sci fi. Also, the title, indicating a future second Maoist or Mao-analogous era. I went along thinking I was reading sci fi until some hundred or so pages in where it mentions Moonies. I looked up the Moonies, and found out that they used to practice these mass weddings. The biggest one was at Madison Square Garden (incidentally, this is still going on -- according to the Telegraph, there was a 40 000-couple wedding just a few months ago; many of the couples were marriaged via simulatenous broadcast).

Mao II, it's later revealed, is the name of an Andy Warhol painting, not a reference to an imaginary future political leader.

The ambuigity of time period is intentional. A conversation between Bill, a reclusive writer, and Karen, the Moonie daughter who is no longer with the Moonies makes this explicit:

"I never think about the future."

"You come from the future," [Bill] said quietly.

But if the book is trying to make some kind of point about the place of cults in the world's future, it's a bit lost on me. The world-events juxtaposition is between the Moonies and the war in Beirut (though what the purpose of this juxtaposition is eludes me). The war is a big feature of the book, and especially a terrorist group that operates from Beirut. There's a recurring mention of Bill's theory that terrorism has made writing irrelevant. Writing used to be the act that shaped culture, but now terror is. The theory is not given a lot of credence by the other characters, but it might be a kind of central theme for the book. I guess.

In case it's not glaringly obvious already, the book left me a little cold. The writing is pretty in parts. The characters are okay but not extremely interesting - they all read a bit like stock characters, frankly: the girl from the cult, the writer who got famous and now doesn't want anyone to know where he lives. The structure is very pat (I won't describe it too much because I don't like to ruin endings, but the themes from the beginning are all taken up again at the end, in that way that is usual for short stories maybe more often than novels). My favourite parts are when Bill thinks about his bodily functions and his ailments. I kept waiting for it to get to other things I might find interesting: actual insights into the cult, for instance, beyond tidbits like, they do their laundry communally and then parcel it out so that you are always wearing someone else's underwear.