The Body Artist
DeLillo, Don & Deignan, Tom
SENSATION & SENSIBILITY The Body Artist Don DeLillo Scribner, $22,128pp.::: Tom Deignan Leave it to Don DeLillo to follow up Underworld with a slim novella that conceivably could be used...
...But it's left unsaid whether or not this is a good thing...
...The Body Artist finally leaves us with a question Brueghel, Henry James, DeLillo, their admirers, and perhaps even the casts of "Survivor" and "Temptation Island" must ponder now and then: "Is reality too powerful for you...
...So even the most isolated characters will inevitably be linked to the vast outside world of plants and animals, chemicals and technology...
...There were the duped masses and paranoia of White Noise, the JFK-conspiracy complex of Libra, and the first section of Underworld, named after a four-hundred-fiftyyear-old Pieter Brueghel painting...
...Perhaps it is the very knowledge of our limitations, our ability to perceive pain and loss, which most vigorously affirm our humanity...
...Tuttle, after an old teacher—"gestured as he spoke, moving his hand to the words," and "the gestures [were] unmistakably Rey's...
...With the radio droning on, Laura discovers a hair in her mouth, which is "still twisted from the experience of sharing some food handler's unknown life...
...They" are Laura Hartke, the titular artist, and Rey Robles, an aging political filmmaker...
...DeLillo, supposed critic of the dehumanized soul, here seems nearly exuberant...
...But this is DeLillo, after all...
...It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life...
...DeLillo has never been merely the chronicler of postwar, postmodern America that many of his fans (and critics) think him to be, althogh it's not hard to see where he got this reputation...
...Turtle Laura's ultimate piece of performance art...
...Tuttle is shielded, of course, from death and loss...
...Is Mr...
...The mystery man—Laura names him Mr...
...Most striking is DeLillo's empathy in his rendering of Laura's struggles...
...But in The Body Artist, DeLillo is pondering short- and long-term matters—the evolution of human perception, and the artist's ability to reflect reality...
...Is The Body Artist a ghost story, with Laura haunted by the memory of her dead husband...
...Not until we learn (via an obituary) that "Rey Robles, 64, Cinema's Poet of Lonely Places" has committed suicide, do we get to DeLillo's real focus in The Body Artist—death and loss, and how the living perceive and contend with such suffering...
...In an age obsessed 18 with "reality" and unprecedented technology able to recreate "reality," what of the artist...
...Despite all the book's nineteenth-century themes, a twenty-first-century DeLillo emerges in The Body Artist...
...She even keeps a tape recorder handy, to help conjure the wide range of men and women who populate her rage-filled, satirical, ultimately autobiographical one-woman show, fittingly titled "Body Time...
...Taken this way, The Body Artist can be seen as an intimate, unsettling update of another short work by a master novelist—Henry James's The Real Thing...
...But Laura is, first and foremost, an artist—a performer who transforms her body, her language, and her very identity in profound ways...
...D Tom Deignan has taught American studies, English, and cinema at CUNY and Saint John's University...
...But they seem secondary to Laura's unique predicament, as well as what Rey at one point calls "the terror of another ordinary day...
...Alternately dense and dazzling, DeLillo can be masterful in this short work, distilling the comic and tragic into a single sentence...
...Take the risk," DeLillo exhorts the reader, not Laura, in a bold narrative moment...
...The Body Artist is a provocative, and perhaps transitional work for this everinnovative novelist...
...At one point, Laura notes with frustration that her ghostly roommate "violates the limits of the human...
...Readers are likely to be drawn into The Body Artist by the allure of DeLillo's heady themes, rather than the symphonic passages that move his grander novels along...
...She also ponders tape recorders, answering machines, newspapers ("a slick hysteria of picture and ink"), radios, mirrors, and even eyeballs, which process matter "upside down before the mind intervenes...
...What did it mean, the first time a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes...
...Underworld famously jumped back and forth from the fifties to the nineties, from Ebbets Field to the Bronx to a nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan, The Body Artist, by contrast, is downright claustrophobic, set almost entirely in an aging "old frame house—a place they'd rented unseen—way too big, and there were creaking floorboards and a number of bent utensils dating to god knows...
...Rey and Laura eat breakfast, pursue their isolated morning routines, all the while talking right past each other in the clipped, occasionally nonsensical style of Edward Albee or Harold Pinter...
...The Body Artist begins ominously—"It happened this final morning"—but quickly turns into a microscopic study of domestic co-habitation...
...Believe what you see and hear...
...Such a resurrection image even suggests a spiritual undercurrent in what does not otherwise seem a particularly religious book...
...Thaf s a start...
...An amalgam of memory, imagination, and loss, both personal and universal...
...SENSATION & SENSIBILITY The Body Artist Don DeLillo Scribner, $22,128pp.::: Tom Deignan Leave it to Don DeLillo to follow up Underworld with a slim novella that conceivably could be used as a bookmark for its hefty, much-acclaimed predecessor...
...DeLillo's vast cultural themes are present...
...DeLillo has by now abandoned any pretense of realism, so it's pointless to ask why Laura "felt no fear...
...He could never, as Laura does in the end, "thrfow] the window open to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was...
...Currently arts editor for the Irish Voice in New York City, he is at work on a novel called Staten Islanders...
...But he also speaks mere gibberish and feels nothing—good or bad...
...Laura "spends hours at the computer screen looking at live streaming video feed from the edge of a twolane road in a city in Finland...
...But in terms of Laura's loss, DeLillo's prose too often seems cerebral, abstract, or needlessly cryptic...
...The gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls," DeLillo writes in a decidedly anti-Hallmark moment, as Laura ponders Mr...
...Tuttle...
...While mourning in a rather frosty manner, Laura discovers a man living in her home...
Vol. 128 • April 2001 • No. 8
