FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In whatever form Don DeLillo chooses to write, there is simply no other American author who has so consistently pushed the boundaries of fiction in his effort to capture the zeitgeist. In The Body Artist, DeLillo tells the hallucinatory tale of performance artist Lauren Hartke in the days following the suicide of her husband, filmmaker Rey Robles. Finishing out their lease of a rented house on the coast, living in a self-imposed exile, Lauren discovers a mysterious man in the bedroom upstairs who is able to repeat -- verbatim -- entire conversations she had with her husband before his death but does not seem to know his own name or where he came from.

DeLillo's emphasis on behavior and the inadequacies of language in The Body Artist will remind readers more of his plays (Valparaiso, The Day Room) than of his novels, and yet, in just a few pages -- 128, as compared to the sweeping, masterful Underworld's 800-plus -- DeLillo still manages to draw a rich portrait of contemporary American life in all its quotidian glory. Describing Lauren in the kitchen on the morning her husband will commit suicide, he writes, "She took the kettle back to the stove because this is how you live a life even if you don't know it." In this opening scene, Lauren and Rey silently struggle to assign meaning and relevance to an ordinary moment. They have a routine; they know what comes next. But they can't say what it is. They seem cut off from their own actions. How do you articulate the emotion that accompanies eating breakfast with your spouse? As Rey puts it, "I want to say something but what." When they finish eating, Rey drives to his ex-wife's apartment in Manhattan to kill himself.

The question remains open as to whether or not the strange man (whom Lauren affectionately names Mr. Tuttle, after an English teacher of hers, when she finds him upstairs) exists at all, or if he is merely a figment of her imagination. But Mr. Tuttle's origins are entirely beside the point. He has no origins. He defies description. He is neither old nor young. "Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after." And leave it to DeLillo to connect this enigma to the Internet. There is a live, 24-hour web site Lauren enjoys viewing: It shows an empty road in Kotka, Finland. Occasionally a car drives by or a person crosses the screen, but generally nothing happens. Lauren is fascinated by the notion that across the globe, at this very moment, this is happening, an episode "real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on." This may also be the best way to describe The Body Artist, a book in which "it all happens around the word seem."

In DeLillo's unique brand of lucid, albeit elliptical, prose, The Body Artist addresses the very questions Gauguin inscribed on his famous painting: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Lauren Hartke answers these questions by transforming the absurdities of her daily life -- that hours can seem long or short and still be hours; how a thing can look like something other than itself -- into a beautiful, suggestive live performance. Through her art, Lauren transcends the limits of language and body, approaching an understanding of her husband's death and more clearly discerning her own original nature. And in a brilliant act of spiritual ventriloquism, DeLillo, "the poet of lonely places," dresses himself up in this character, placing us in the extreme situation of her search for an experience of meaning she can call living.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

As the Seattle Times said of DeLillo's last novel, "Masterpieces teach you how to read them." The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

SYNOPSIS

In this spare, seductive novel, Don DeLillo inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. She lives in a rented rambling house on a lonely coast. There she encounters a strange, ageless man with uncanny knowledge of her life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post Book World

This novel by an American master can be read in a single sitting. But you should probably allow time to ponder the precision of his prose and the depth of his understanding.

Book Magazine

The Body Artist is the gem with which Don DeLillo follows his last masterwork, 1997's mountain of prose, Underworld. The two novels could hardly seem more different. Underworld took 827 pages to scrutinize fifty years of recent American life. Everything that obsesses its author was in it: politics and violence, baseball, immigrant struggle, a view of history as an elaboration of dense conspiracies. The Body Artist, by comparison, is skeletal fiction: poetic, suggestive, cryptic. Whereas Underworld exploded—a virtuoso turn in multifarious tongues (DeLillo analyzed, rhapsodized and burrowed with a kind of enraptured journalist's frenzy into real-world detail)—The Body Artist implodes. Everything in it happens inside a single character, a soul in extremis. It's a dark-night-of-the-soul book, a secular Gethsemane experience wherein a soul is tested and tried. And yet, at 124 pages, it gives us as complete a world as Underworld did. This time it's the interior world, and the struggle there is devastating, yet, in the end, perhaps triumphant. The dark night is Lauren Hartke's. She's the body artist, a sort of conceptual/performance artist who contorts her flesh to render physical metaphysical states; "body talking" about inner experience, she presents open-ended narratives played out in unfunny mime. Until the novel's conclusion, DeLillo reserves description of her actual "slow, spare and painful" art; we know, though, from the second page, that her intelligence is kinesthetic—her senses pick up things uncannily: "She rubbed her hand dry on her jeans, feeling a sense somewhere of the color blue, runny andwan." Her work, and the book's title, can't help evoking Kafka's astonishing story, "The Hunger Artist." There, a strange performer engaged in a life-and-death struggle to find any "food" to nourish him; his search was excruciating. We know, too, that at the novel's start, Lauren has found herself in a remote rented house in a kind of lovers' exile with her husband, Rey Robles, "cinema's poet of lonely places." He's a cult legend, and significantly older; like Picasso's women, she's as much acolyte as amour. Soon enough, her own loneliness intensifies as Robles, on a short trip away from their apparent idyll, kills himself in the Manhattan apartment of a former wife. Lauren's world collapses; she retreats beneath the skin of grief. Her work is clear: survival. A year ago, DeLillo joined the august company of Graham Greene, Simone de Beauvoir and Jorge Luis Borges as a recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, accorded writers "whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society." Since the early '70s, DeLillo has examined potent mini-societies: football in End Zone; rock 'n' roll in Great Jones Street; the university in White Noise; the media and subterranean politics in Mao II. In each novel, often an agitated seeker/loner contends with such societies—the most memorable, Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra, is both a puppet and perpetrator in the byzantine twilight of JFK-assassination plotland. In The Body Artist, society of almost any sort recedes. There's detritus in the minutiae of quotidian life (breakfast cereal, the Internet, Toyotas), but upon the death of her lover, Lauren is left all alone. She becomes a hermit; in psych-speak, she dissociates, losing touch with corporeal reality (a bitter, ironic fate for a body artist, as it's the state mystics speak of when the soul readies to fly from "the alone to the Alone"). A castaway, then, on her isle of pain, she refuses any outside succor. But a surreal Man Friday discovers her; he's been secreted all along in the recesses of her rented hideaway. She's been hearing odd rustlings (remember Jane Eyre's intimations of a ghostly presence in the walls). Not only is she then haunted by her dead lover, but by a ghost who materializes. An amazing fictional creation, this character is an ageless, babyish homeless man, whose language—telegraphic bursts of disconnected words—seems the vestiges of grammar, intelligence and "civilization." Part imp, part savage, he says things that Lauren decodes into meaning. Examining identity and expression, the urge toward communication and communion, The Body Artist follows Lauren and her eerie companion (alternately muse and memory and conscience) as she works toward transforming her art and life. She begins anew: "Her eyes had to adjust to the night sky. She walked away from the house, out of the spill of electric light, and the sky grew deeper. She watched for a long time and it began to spread and melt and go deeper still, developing strata and magnitudes and light-years in numbers so unapproachable that someone had to invent idiot names to represent the arrays of ones and zeros and powers and dominations because only the bedtime language of childhood can save us from awe and shame." —Paul Evans

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 he failed film director Rey Robles, 64, is dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She, Lauren, a "body artist," goes 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 point the 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 artist and 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 Cahners Business Information.

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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/00.]--Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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