In dialogue with Brita and others, Bill laments that novelists are quickly becoming obsolete in an age where terrorism has supplanted art as the "raids on consciousness" that jolt and transform culture at large.

Bill disappears without a word and secretly decides to accept an opportunity from his former editor Charles to travel to London to publicly speak on the behalf of a Swiss writer held hostage in war-torn Beirut.

In Cyprus, Bill is hit by a car and suffers a lacerated liver which, exacerbated by his heavy drinking, kills him in his sleep while en route to Beirut.

'"[2] Just two years before the novel was published Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie after his publication of The Satanic Verses and New York Post photographers had ambushed J. D. Salinger in New Hampshire.

DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond the official versions of our daily history, behind all easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."

[3] In The New York Times, Lorrie Moore wrote that "no one's prose is better than Mr. DeLillo's", and noted the author's "way of capturing a representative slice of a city, his ability to reproduce ineffable urban rhythms, his startling evocations of sights and smells."

"[4] A reviewer for Publishers Weekly deemed the novel a "remarkable achievement" and stated, "The beauty of DeLillo's prose enlivens such seemingly dry questions.

For all its 'cool gloom,' his latest novel stands in denial of Gray's doom-drenched semiotics: it's a luminous book, full of anger deflected into irony, with moments of hard-earned transcendence.

"[6] Conversely, John Lanchester argued in the London Review of Books that Mao II had a "rather over-schematic central theme and plot-strand” and criticized the novel as "[trying] to force home Gray’s arguments that ‘what terrorists gain, novelists lose’.

[10] In a 2016 retrospective write-up for Granta, Colin Barrett lauded Mao II as a "mordantly funny, casually prescient, hypnotically condensed novel about art, about terror [...] short, loosely plotted but simultaneously tight as a drum".