Writers Among Terrorists: Don DeLillo's Mao II and the Rushdie Affair
Terror, like an airborne toxic event, floats across the deceptively shiny surfaces of Don DeLillo's fiction, turning the reassuring rituals of even suburban lifeÂ—filling up at the self-service pump, or playing golfÂ—into desperate acts. The intersecting planes of that world, even at Its glossiest, always include nameless dread, the possibility that the banal will erupt into violence, the clichA©s of the tabloid come to life. Not surprisingly, terrorists, cult murderers, assassins, and hit men have always been at home in that world, but /Wao" // (1991) marks a new phase as DeLillo's first extended exploration of the relationship between terrorists and writers. In this novel DeLiIIo moves away from an older view, found in James and Conrad, of the terrorist as the writer's alter ego, to a view of the terrorist as the writer's antagonist, the perhaps victorious author of a new narrative that writes out the small part left for the romantic idea of the novelist. Whatever other influences may be at play in Mao II, since February 14, 1989, when the Ayatollah Issued his fatwa, it has been impossible to think about terrorists and writers without thinking of