to Beirut to photograph Abu Rashid, the terrorist responsible for the kidnapping. The fate of the hostage is never revealed, though the implication is grim. The plot unfolds with DeLillo's customary shifts of time, setting, and character. Themes The last sentence of the prologue reveals an important and major theme in Mao II: "The future belongs to crowds." Crowds feature heavily in the book, from the opening crowds of thousands at the mass wedding at Yankee Stadium, to the crowds living in Tompkins Square Park, to the thousands of mourners at the Ayatollah's funeral as observed on television by Karen. The nature of crowds and their relation to personal and collective identity are explored. In predicting an age of terror in which "the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings," DeLillo was eerily ahead of his time in contemplating the profound effect that political terror was soon to have on American society. The question of the efficacy of art in the context of dogmatism and violence of a massive scale is central to the narrative. In preparing the novel, DeLillo's editor at Viking, Nan Graham, said, "Long before he had written anything Don told me he had two folders -- one marked 'art' and the other marked 'terror.'" 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 cited the published Salinger photograph and a photograph of a Unification Church Blessing ceremony he came across as inspiration for the book, telling Vince Passaro: Pynchon Blurb Notoriously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon provided the blurb for "Mao II." It reads: "This novel's a beauty. 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." Reception In The Washington Post, Sven Birkerts referred to Mao II as one of DeLillo's best novels. While arguing that "the tension that gathers around Gray dissipates towards the end and the final pages feel unfocused", Birkerts praised the ways in which the crowd motif is threaded throughout the novel and also praised the secondary characters, writing, "There is always a new angle, a