Product Description

The "Body Artist" opens with a breakfast scene in a rambling rented house somewhere on the New England coast. We meet Lauren Hartke, the body artist of the title, and her husband Rey Robles, a much older, thrice-married film-director. Through their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of marriage, and of the idiosyncrasies that both isolate and bind us. Rey says he's taking a drive and he does, all the way to the Manhattan apartment of his first wife. Lauren is left alone, or so she thinks. She is soon to discover, however, that there is a stranger in the house. An eery individual who often speaks in Rey's voice or in her own, who knows both intimate moments of their past life and things that haven't yet happened. "A novel that is both slight and profound, a distilled meditation on perception and loss, and a poised, individual ghost story for the twenty-first century" - "Observer". "A masterful talent is behind its language, so magnificent in simplicity. Inspiring. God, but it's a beautiful book" - "Independent on Sunday".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #213129 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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
'A novel that is both slight and profound, a distiled meditation on perception and loss, and a poised, individual ghost story for the twenty-first century' Observer; 'A masterful talent is behind its language, so magnificent in simplicity. Inspiring... God, but it's a beautiful book' Independent on Sunday

About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of eleven novels including White Noise, Libra, Mao II and Underworld which was an international bestseller. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

How much ambiguity can you accept?
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

brilliant
A stripped back , pared piece of writing that is also wonderfully rich in its reverberations , The Body Artist is undoubtedly the best work of fiction I have read in years . Why has it taken so long for a novel this good to emerge ? At one level the story is a gripping and eerie ghost story for the 21st century ; at a deeper level it is a profound and thought-provoking exploration of the nature of time , reality language and loss . In this work Delillo manages to say more in one page than most novelists can manage in a whole novel . It combines the meditative power of Proust with the laser-like incisiveness of Beckett . It probes and questions with a lightness of touch that gives the writing pace and momentum . Delillo has said that writing is a concentrated form of thinking . In The Body Artist the thoughts of the narrator and the main protagonist are visceral and lie at the core of the novel . In terms of plot the novel is spare - after her husband mysteriously shoots himself dead , the protagonist is left alone in the matrimonial home she and her husband had been renting . Equally mysteriously , a young man appears in the house who uncannily mimics the voices of the protagonist and her late husband and then strangely disappears . - but it is the thinking that grows out of this that is complex erudite and exhilarating . Delillo conducts a forensic analysis of perception and time peeling back the layers of reality to reveal the irreducible core of things .The language is inventive and powerful and glass-sharp while retaining an emotional sensual quality . At times , the fractured syntax betokens the dislocation and disjunction at the heart of thinking . At times , the language has a sinuous elusive quality that is haunting . The writing attempts , magnificently , to deal with the places that exist underneath ostensible reality , and with what ghosts spookily behind and in between language . This novel is not merely well written ; it makes you think . Few novels do that .

A yawning chasm of emptiness
I suppose you could call this "stripped back" and "pared." But you could also call it trendily minimalist and boring. Clearly a book published on the coattails of his greater works. Almost a struggle to get through.