The Body Artist

"The Body Artist" by Don DeLillo is simply a rare escapade into the world of literary realism. There is so much harmony in this book that it I found it difficult to disassociate myself from the hypnotic force of its words. The novel is a very comprehensive observation into the psyche of a lonely widow whose profession is to paint the reality of her feelings, emotions and experiences via her artistic skill - the capacity to manipulate her own body during performances during which she enacts her own personality as well as those of her dead husband and a ghost. But it really doesn't matter what the story is about and I can't stop repeating this ever since reading Franzen's "The Corrections". The realism of these highly effective magicians (DeLillo, Franzen, Auster) dubbed writers by the society, is so captivating that the only reason I pick up their books is to immerse myself in the pure texture of words. With these types of books there is no need to compose a thrill ride, or mystery, or some bizarre supernatural occurrence. There isn't a need because the construction of their works is supernatural itself. I may be sitting down, or laying down, or walking when I read or listen to these books, but I might just as well be blind, or a prisoner, or a king somewhere, it simply wouldn't matter, because every time I'm instantaneously transformed into a giant ear, a colossal eye, an infinite brain whose only task is to acquire and process, and feed on the beauty of their words. And so that's all. This book, like the rare few out there is a precious gem. It should be studied, it should be a required material in schools, it should be praised. I highly recommend it. - by Simon Cleveland

The Body Artist is one of the strangest--and most seductive--books I've read in a long time, a "ghost story" with a character who is described as if he were real, and whom the main character believes to be real, and who may, in fact, be real--but who may also be a figment of imagination. Events which are described as real may be fantasies, and even the relationships the main character has or has had with people who seem to be real may, in fact, be colored by wishful thinking. Ultimately, even the linear progression of the narrative itself is called into question since, DeLillo tells us, "Past, present, and future are not amenities of language." The story begins with the intimately described minutiae of breakfast, as a couple, married just a short time, gets ready for the day. We learn that it takes two cycles on the toaster to get the bread the right color, that the cup is his and the paper is hers, that a blue jay comes to the bird feeder, that she puts soya on her cereal and that it smells like feet. When Rey Robles, the husband, dies later that day (something we know from the beginning), the world of the wife, Lauren Hartke, changes from one of communication and an outward focus to a world of grief and an inward focus. When she discovers a stranger living on the third floor of her rented house, we aren't sure whether he is real or whether he materializes to show Lauren's unresolved feelings about her loss and the depth of her trauma. The stranger, dubbed Mr. Tuttle, is handicapped, unable to understand or communicate in language in any traditional way. Fascinating in its focus on internal action, the reader must ultimately just accept the story for what it is while enjoying the glories of the meticulous prose, the acutely felt portrait of a woman grieving, the suggested symbolism in birds and nature, and the author's depiction of the ambiguities and uncertainties of life and time. This is a work which uses language in new ways, ultimately even calling into question the use of language itself to make sense of the world. Like Lauren, DeLillo himself is a performance artist. Mary Whipple

DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork "Underworld" made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age. "The Body Artist" has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is prefered over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritutalized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event.DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud.A short, haunted masterwork.

Some may dismiss "The Body Artist" as a minor work after DeLillo's sprawling masterpiece "Underworld." In heft, this is a lighter work, an easy evening read. But in style and subject, DeLillo breaks new ground with this novel and achieves surprising poignancy.The book begins with DeLillo's trademark observation -- a couple, unknown to us, go through a morning's breakfast routine. Here DeLillo is the DeLillo we know, microanalyzing how Rey spoons the insides of a fig and spreads it on his toast, repeating three, four, five times how Lauren must push the toaster lever down twice to get bread toasted the way she likes. In previous novels, DeLillo has used this technique to point out the banality of modern life, and I assumed he was doing it again.But "The Body Artist" is not "White Noise." Lauren Hartdke is not everywoman, she is a flesh and blood character dealing with painful loss. To say much more about the plot would risk giving everything away -- after all, the story is less than 120 pages. It's the size and form of a short story and should be read like one, in one sitting.I can say that DeLillo reinvents himself with this work, finding beauty in modern banality, even sorrow in its loss. For all the intellect and power in DeLillo's previous works, they could leave many readers cold. "The Body Artist" is a beautiful exercise for DeLillo, evidence that one of our finest living writers may have his best works ahead of him.