Product Description

For thirty years, 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.

Now, to a new century, he has brought The Body Artist. In this spare, seductive 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 -- 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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #266613 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Amazon.com Review
Don DeLillo's reputation rests on a series of large-canvas novels, in which he's proven to be the foremost diagnostician of our national psyche. In The Body Artist, however, he 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. And like James's tale, it seems to partake of at least seven kinds of ambiguity, leaving the reader to sort out its riddles. 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. And Lauren's performances--for she is the body artist of the title--sound pretty awful, the kind of thing Artaud might have cooked up for an aerobics class. Still, when DeLillo reins in the abstractions and bears down, the results are heartbreaking:

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

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

From Publishers Weekly
After 11 novels, DeLillo (Underworld; White Noise) is an acknowledged American master, and a writer who rarely repeats his successes. This slim novella is puzzling, and may prove entirely mystifying to many readers; like all DeLillo's fiction, it offers a vision of contemporary life that expresses itself most clearly in how the story is told. Would you recognize what you had said weeks earlier, if it were the last thing, among other last things, you said to someone you loved and would never see again? That question, posed late in the narrative, helps explain the somewhat aimless and seemingly pointless opening scene, in which a couple gets up, has breakfast, and the man looks for his keys. Next we learn that heDfailed film director Rey Robles, 64Dis dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. SheDLauren, a "body artist"Dgoes on living alone in their house along a lonely coast, until she tracks a noise to an unused room on the third floor and to a tiny, misshapen man who repeats back conversations that she and Rey had weeks before. Is Mr. Tuttle, as Lauren calls him, real, possibly an inmate wandered off from a local institution? Or is he a figment of Lauren's grieving imagination? Is thisDas DeLillo playfully slips into Lauren's mind at one pointDthe first case of a human abducting an alien? One way of reading this story is as a novel told backwards, in a kind of time loop: DeLillo keeps hidden until his closing pages Lauren's role as a body artistDand with it, the novel's true narrative intent. DeLillo is always an offbeat and challenging novelist, and this little masterpiece of the storyteller's craft may not be everyone's masterpiece of the storytelling art. But like all DeLillo's strange and unforgettable works, this is one every reader will have to decide on individually. (Feb. 6)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Delillo's penchant for intermingling historical facts with fiction and his knack for creating uncanny but likely characters, such as the professor of Hitler studies in White Noise, are the most recognizable traits of his novels. While his latest work also explores the familiar themes of fear, mistrust, and misgiving, it is Delillo's most unusual as well as his riskiest endeavor. Residing in a ghostly seaside house, protagonist Lauren Hartke is a gifted body artist who contorts her body both to manipulate and to escape reality. After her husband's sudden suicide, she encounters a man (or a shadow of a man) who knows the most intimate details of her life and is even able to repeat back the couple's past conversations. The two begin a strange relationship that transcends time, space, and human imagination. One of the passing characters best summarizes the crux of the tale when she claims that Hartke's art is about "who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are." This sparse but precise novella may be easily read in one sitting, but it takes an attentive reader willing to give a major author like Delillo room to maneuver to value this kind of eerie symbolism. The Body Artist may not have an epic range, but it proves that its author does, and it will possibly open a new chapter in his prolific career.
-DMirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

A Low-Key but Contemplative Outing from DeLillo
After his sprawling 'Underworld', DeLillo wrote this whimsy of a book. But don't be fooled by the slimness of this volume... the themes of love, loss and death are probed as thoroughly and poetically as only DeLillo knows how.

Lauren's observations in the beginning are masterfully written. Everyday events and ritualistic details are written with an elliptical, but precise grace. It's a deliberate slowing down of the cognitive process (of Lauren's, and in turn, ours) to plumb the mysteries of what we commonly take as given.

Rey's death resounds throughout the book, and the weird stranger/ghost that inhabits the house is one of the most haunting characters/ideas I've read in recent years. Lauren's sense of loss, and the physical craving to fill such loss, such sorrow are expertly drawn, with unflinching emotional honesty.

It's a refreshing surprise to find that one of the most maximalist, post-modern fictioneers we have in America is also one of the more intricate miniaturists. Very impressive.

A good book for some
This is a not a dramatic book. This is a book that you read on a rainy afternoon in one sitting and bathe in the mood. The sentences are short at times, choppy and fragmented--a complaint made by the current "spot light reviewer". This is done for reason, for mood, and for effect. To some it may feel like a published experimental garbage-dump only gotten into print because of DeLillo's fantastic reputation. However, to read this book well you have to look at it as a whole.

The title, "The Body Artist", has as much bearing on this short work as the characters inside it. There is a backround of artistry, one of ambiguous interpretation not unlike those "new age" plays shown in the city. The book is light and dense at the same time; some of the sentences will strike you as odd and uneeded with no depth, while other scenes will captivate you with an overwhelming feeling of depression--hopefully lasting throughout the length of the novel. While I was reading, the book almost called for a scholarly analysis of theme and characterization: like I said, if read right the feeling of despair and eccentricity will seep into you. Read it with an artistic viewpoint and you'll be nicely rewarded.

Another Turn of The Screw
Having read all of DeLillo's books ... this seems to be the most interesting. I have never have to read books twice to get the plot but this book presents the second time ever that I have had to do exactly that. I read Turn of the Screw four times before getting it. With the Body Artist, I had to read it three times to get to the essence of the book.

What is it with short novellas as ghost stories? Why are they thicker than they appear on paper.

The Body Artist is not my favorite work but the first chapter is so good.