<![CDATA[The Body Artist: A Novel]]>

false <![CDATA[The Body Artist: A Novel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166485771m/11767.jpg 11767 22 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: <blockquote> 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. </blockquote> 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 1304282 2001 The Body Artist: A Novel total:1926|5:227|4:432|3:717|2:422|1:128| 1926 5986 2500 159 3 3 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Sep 14 09:27:41 -0700 2007 Sat Sep 15 09:14:43 -0700 2007 White Noise in college, right along with everyone else, and thought it was a truly a modern classic, just like everybody else. Then, in graduate school, I also read Libra in a 500-level literature class called “Post Post Modern Fiction.�...more...]]> 3 1 false false Tue Apr 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 14 06:53:35 -0700 2008 Mon Apr 14 06:57:02 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 1 false false Thu Apr 09 12:26:56 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 09 12:28:46 -0700 2009 3 1 false false Thu Mar 27 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Mar 25 09:02:11 -0700 2008 Thu Mar 27 08:22:10 -0700 2008 The Body Artist is a near perfect bit of prose-poetry, two people microscopically dissected through a few minutes of mundane action. Everything proceeds in a sort of hyperreal slow motion, but it flows easily, naturally, even so. From there, the book switches gears into a study...more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 13 20:29:45 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 13 20:33:57 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Sat Jul 15 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Wed Dec 10 12:08:16 -0800 2008 Wed Dec 10 13:49:17 -0800 2008 Don DeLillo. This is a name that has been dropped whenever "good" books or "good" writers are mentioned. He won the National Book Award for his novel "White Noise" in 1985 and when I saw "The Body Artist" on the shelf in Barnes and Noble, at a slim and undaunt...more...]]> 3 0 false false Mon Sep 21 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 20 18:00:05 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 21 03:00:43 -0700 2009 The first chapter of this slim novel is simply amazing--almost reason enough to read it. In some ways, it could even be enjoyed as a short story, a marital slice-of-life, completely removed from the remainder of the book.

As for the rest, all is pure Delillo, possibly even more abst...more...]]> 4 0 false false Sun Apr 12 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Apr 12 11:11:10 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 14 15:11:37 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 1 false false Sat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri May 23 16:00:49 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 01 18:28:15 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Thu Jun 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 24 20:01:54 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 24 20:17:55 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Wed Jul 15 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Jul 18 06:55:09 -0700 2009 Sat Jul 18 06:56:23 -0700 2009 http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/7244...

A ghost story far from my favourite genre but I thought I would try it as it is a minuscule novella and would take very little time to read.

The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, The Body Artist and the story centres on her being alone in...more...]]> 2 0 false true Sat Oct 31 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Nov 03 00:52:11 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 03 01:03:19 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2005 Thu Aug 06 08:10:42 -0700 2009 Thu Aug 06 10:01:28 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Thu Dec 04 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri Dec 12 05:23:35 -0800 2008 Fri Dec 12 05:30:28 -0800 2008
A woman whose career seems to be part avant garde performance art and part contortionism loses her husband to suicide, and meets a very strange...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Jul 25 15:26:07 -0700 2009 Sat Jul 25 15:28:00 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 0 false false Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2003 Sat Jul 25 22:03:19 -0700 2009 Sat Jul 25 22:03:30 -0700 2009 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?)...more...]]> 0 0 false false Mon Nov 10 10:42:23 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 10 10:42:23 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false true Thu Feb 26 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sat Oct 18 07:04:19 -0700 2008 Thu Feb 26 17:56:21 -0800 2009 I am through Chapter 6 and am finding this very different from what I am used to reading. What IS a body artist?

It was interesting to say the least. It starts rather innocently with ...more...]]> 5 0 false false Wed Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006 Fri Aug 22 10:56:44 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 06 08:28:13 -0700 2009
The novel is a very comprehensive observation into the ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu May 08 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu May 08 10:11:28 -0700 2008 Thu May 08 10:12:45 -0700 2008 more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=11767