[.ca] The Body Artist: A Novel (ISBN 0743203968)

From Amazon.com:
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

Interesting, thought-provoking parable...:
The Body Artist is an interesting, engaging rumination. I do, however, have one piece of advice: be sure you are in the mood to read this book. It's not your typical novel, because it appears to be flat and uneventful -- in other words, no plot to speak of. But it will make you think about the nature of identity and what makes us who we are. The Body Artist is really more of a parable than a novel. The two main characters -- Lauren, a "body artist" who turns her own body into nothingness and a strange man who had until recently lived secretly in her home and who has the gift of mimicking other people's voices, but with no voice of his own -- are interesting in their bizarre similarities. But nothing really happens to them. Even so, DeLillo writes with marvelous, beautiful prose. Read this if you are in the mood for something experimental, literary and thought provoking.

A HAUNTING NOVELLA ABOUT THE SHATTERING EFFECTS OF DEATH:
This is not an easy novel, and don't let its length (a mere 124 pages) let you think otherwise. The plot is anything but usual. After a young artist's husband commits suicide, she resumes her life only to one day discover a strange person sitting on a bed in an unused room, an otherworldly man-child who speaks in cryptic utterances that lack context and syntax. She assumes that he suffers from autism and plans to notify authorities; but changes her mind after hearing him repeat, word for word, a conversation she had with her husband on the day of his death. Wow. Who is this quaint stranger -- unwilling time traveler? Is our protagonist no more than a desperate woman whose grief and isolation have made her delusional? At first I was somewhat frustrated by these questions, but found myself haunted by the layered meanings. When it was not the prose that had me thinking, I was smitten with DeLillo's fascinatingly poetic writing style. He weaves such a riveting tapestry of words to delve into the emotional minutiae of his characters that he not only captivates our sympathetic attention he has us thinking like we were the ones he was talking about. I highly recommend this effortlessly engrossing tale if you have a taste for offbeat but thought-provoking literature.

Quick read:
I really loved the premise. I was fascinated about it. I think it would make a wonderful movie or play. It was a quick read and held my attention. I really would like to see the whole premise even taken farther. I was a bit dissapointed that we didn't focus on "Mr. Tuttle" more - I could've read about him even more.

Hated it.:
Hey, I liked "White Noise" too. But give me a break. Completely implausible with precious little insight to Delillo's masterful skill with dialogue and his uncanny ability to sculpt a feeling of despair and dread. Simply: what this book whiffs on altogether is a strain of narration into which a reader may engage. That's important. Over time, reviews of this book are more well-received. I think it's because Amazon.com readers are looking for an excuse to say "novella." That's what I think. This book was appropriately panned when it first arrived and will not endure.

Delillo double-bogey:
This is not meant to be helpful; rather it's meant to express my distaste for this Delillo offering. The Body Artist is one of the most artsy, pretentious novels I've ever read.