SOURCE: Bull, Jeoffrey S. “‘What about a Problem That Doesn't Have a Solution?’ Stone's A Flag for Sunrise, DeLillo's Mao II, and the Politics of Political Fiction.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 3 (spring 1999): 215-29.

In the following excerpt, Bull discusses the political dimension of the novel form and examines the presence of ideological impasses in Stone's A Flag for Sunrise and Don DeLillo's Mao II, wherein crises of politics, religion, and morality are shown to have no apparent solutions.

The political novel, says Irving Howe, is a work of fiction alive with the “internal tensions” born of abstract ideologies colliding with “representations of human behavior and feeling” (20)—and since World War II, by his estimation, such fiction has only been produced outside the West (254). In his 1986 epilogue to Politics and the Novel, Howe describes authors such as V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Milan Kundera—among others...