Body Artist, the - Softcover

Delillo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743203968 ISBN 13: 9780743203968

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2002

Synopsis

A stunning novel by the bestselling National Book Award-winning author of White Noise and Underworld. Since the publication of his first novel Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American. In The Body Artist his spare, seductive twelfth novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time, love and human perception. The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

About this title

Review:

In The Body Artist, Don DeLillo sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld)--an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the window and makes idle chat. Rey, alas, will proceed directly from the breakfast table to the home of his former wife, where he'll unceremoniously blow his brains out.

What follows is one of the strangest ghost stories since The Turn of the Screw. Returning to their summer rental after Rey's funeral, Lauren discovers a strange stowaway living in a spare room: an inarticulate young man, perhaps retarded, who may have been there for weeks. His very presence is hard for her to pin down: "There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinning of physical address." Yet soon this mysterious figure begins to speak in Rey's voice, and her own, playing back entire conversations from the days preceding the suicide. Has Lauren's husband been reincarnated? Or is the man simply an eavesdropping idiot savant, reproducing sentences he'd heard earlier from his concealment?

DeLillo refuses any definitive answer. Instead he lets Lauren steep in her grief and growing puzzlement, and speculates in his own voice about this apparent intersection of past and present, life and death. At times his rhetoric gets away from him, an odd thing for such a superbly controlled writer. "How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?" he asks, sounding as though he's discussing a sick puppy. Still, when DeLillo reigns in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking.

At this stage of his career, a thin book is an adventure for DeLillo. So is his willingness to risk sentimentality, to immerse us in personal rather than national traumas. For all its flaws, then, The Body Artist is a real, raw accomplishment, and a reminder that bigger, even for so capacious an imagination as DeLillo's, isn't always better. --James Marcus

Review:

Malcolm Jones Newsweek The work of a masterful writer.

Adam Begley The New York Times Book Review A metaphysical ghost story about a woman alone...intimate, spare, exquisite.

Mark Luce The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Dazzling, disturbing, and lyrical.

Gail Caldwell The Boston Globe Eerie and sometimes discomfiting...DeLillo achieves a creepily hypnotic effect with his stark, probing prose....A glimpse at the desolate landscape that all of us inhabit and where no one else is.

Joseph Tirella People A tightly constructed string quartet...[a] spare gem of a novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743203968
• ISBN 13: 9780743203968
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128