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 new window onto a world in its paroxysms of transformation." Birkerts lauded the work as "DeLillo's strongest statement yet about the crisis of crises. Namely: that we are living in the last violet twilight of the individual".[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." While writing that she was more "engaged and impressed" than moved by Mao II and that the novel has less emotional depth than White Noise and Libra, Moore still praised DeLillo's ability to convey multiple points of view and argued that "within its own defined parameters [...] Mr. DeLillo's new book succeeds as brilliantly as any of his others."[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. Mao II reconfirms DeLillo's status as a modern master and literary provocateur."[5] It also received praise in Kirkus Reviews, where the reviewer wrote that the author's "talking heads murmur the mysteries of our age. 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’. This, oddly enough, is to do those ideas a disservice, as, in Keats's famous words, ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design on us.’ I don’t think I will be the only reader of Mao II to miss DeLillo in his comic vein, the comic vein which hasn’t at all precluded seriousness in his other work; its absence in Mao II is, I’m afraid, likely to have something to do with a vocational self-importance."[7] In The New York Review of Books, Robert Towers wrote, "Mao II is a more somber work, less concentrated as a narrative; and it is shorter than either of its predecessors. The cast of characters is relatively small, and the characters themselves, while sharply delineated, are perhaps less interesting in the long run than the images and themes that cluster around them."[8]
Mao II was placed in the second tier ("Recommended") in a 2007 New York guide to DeLillo's oeuvre, where the novel was described as "DeLillo at his most aphoristic [...] Less a novel than a series of crowd-scene set pieces linked by a reclusive novelist’s attempt to free a poet hostage, it contains his most extended thoughts on the relationship between fiction and terrorism."[9] In 2011, Martin Amis listed Mao II among his favorite novels in DeLillo’s output.[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".[11] Jeff Somers ranked it sixth among 17 DeLillo books, arguing that "it doesn’t have much of a plot and can be perceived as DeLillo disappearing into himself—but when you’re as strong a writer as DeLillo, you can get away with that. Its seemingly prophetic vision of terrorist acts to come (it was published in 1991) grant the book gravitas".[12]
