The Body Artist

A thoroughly strange little book, The Body Artist clocks in at only 128pp but it fair packs a punch. Don DeLillo's writing conveys a pervasive sense of stillness and silence throughout as he explores the profundity and bizarreness of grief, the necessity of art and performance, and the inescapable consequences of cause and effect. My first DeLillo, but definitely not my last.

“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.”

Um okay,just destroy me.

This is a successful tone piece — an extended daydream that drifts skillfully from finely chiseled observations to ethereal reveries skirting the mystical. The plot is minimal, so don't expect much in the way of drama, but there is one twist near the end worth waiting for that flips the point-of-view to the other side of the mirror and serves as an effective reveal.

DeLillo is a great experimenter. He clearly enjoys reordering the most common words in ways that ask you to reconsider their meaning. And by creating a character who, we're told, exists outside of time and circumstance, he sets himself the challenge of using language to communicate thoughts that don't know how to be formed. DeLillo, in other words, wants us to hear what language would be like if generated by a mind that can only reflect and not produce thought. It works, in that respect. That doesn't make the experience scintillating, but for those who appreciate witnessing a great literary scientist in the lab, it's worth a read.

Although beautifully written most of the time, it isn't exactly my cup of tea. It feels too much like a play than a book. Which is spot on for the story, but hard to read for me. I really loved the first chapter though, which felt like a dance.

Let me see if I can explain the plot
of this book! DeLillo describes every
detail of the breakfast of a husband
and wife. Then the husband kills himself.
The wife later finds a (psychic?)
man living in her house and develops
a relationship with him. It felt to
me like this was written as an exercise
for a creative writing class; very forced.