“The Body Artist” by Don DeLillo
A grieving woman, an almost empty house and a very strange visitor add up to a metaphysical puzzle by this American master.
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Some of Don DeLillo’s fans — the ones who worship the elegant, elusive sweep of his novels, their all-encompassing but somehow serene paranoia — will be puzzled by his new book. “The Body Artist” is short, even modest. It focuses almost relentlessly on one person’s consciousness, with little interest in the forces of history and culture. Instead, DeLillo asks the smaller, more itchy philosophical questions: whether someone is the same person from moment to moment, for example. He seems to want to make his readers burrow inside themselves; he’d like them to look at their own versions of reality from a new, unprotected emotional perspective, deprived of all the padding with which we tend to face the hard truths of human existence. “There’s something about the wind,” DeLillo writes at one point, and he could as well be talking about his own methods. “It strips you of assurances, working into you, continuous, making you feel the hidden thinness of everything around you, all the solid stuff of a hundred undertakings.” If you’re up for that kind of expert mind-fuck, the rewards of “The Body Artist” are great.
The body artist of the title is Lauren Hartke, who does conceptual performance art pieces in which she systematically transforms her body on stage in various ways. She’s suddenly lost her husband, a self-invented Spanish film director named Rey Robles. In a short, lovely opening set piece, DeLillo presents us with a moment-by-moment account of their final morning together: She can’t stop sniffing the box of soy granules, trying to figure out what they smell like, as he half-answers her questions and they share the newspaper and turn the radio on and off.
We soon learn of Rey’s death by reading his obituary, and the rest of the novel scrutinizes Lauren’s inner world during the first few months of her grief. She discovers that a mysterious, childlike, half-insane homeless man has been living in the ramshackle seaside house the couple has been renting, and he freaks her out by repeating snatches of her conversations with Rey over the past months. As she holes up in the house, avoiding answering the phone and trying to figure out how to relate to the strange little man, it’s almost, but of course not really, as if Rey is still there with her.
Maria Russo has been a writer and editor at The Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer and Salon, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. More Maria Russo.



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