THE BODY ARTIST
By Don DeLillo
Scribner, 128 pages, $22
`Time” is the first word in Don DeLillo’s latest fiction, a slender meditation on the medium and motive of all fiction. “Once upon a time . . .” is how the ancient storytellers conjured up their art, attempting to deploy language in search of lost time, or at least in recognition that one way to measure life is duration. “Time seems to pass,” begins the narrator of “The Body Artist,” and no sooner does the book affirm the primacy of that inexorable force than it reduces it to an illusion.
Though I have read it three times, I have spent less time with “The Body Artist” than with DeLillo’s previous narrative effort, “Underworld,” which, at 827 pages, is one of the most ambitious American novels of the past four years and a formidable doorstop. At a mere 128 pages, the new novella aims to stop nothing but time. “It is time that defines your existence,” thinks Lauren Hartke, a supple performance artist who tries to redefine that existence by creating a piece called “Body Time” that exposes, expands and expunges time.
Lauren, 36, is the book’s eponymous body artist. She has been married to Rey Robles, a 64-year-old film director, for four months when he returns to the apartment of his first wife and unexpectedly shoots himself dead. The newlyweds had been renting an old frame house in a secluded coastal area, and, though she considers New York City her home, Lauren determines to remain there for the two months left on their lease. In contrast to DeLillo’s best-known books, which offer a vibrant cast of dozens and immersion into the powdered soup of popular culture, “The Body Artist” is a story of reclusion, by a character who is so self-effacing that she sands down her skin with pumices, files and emery boards, and depigments herself with fade cream, the better to become “a blankness, a body slate erased of every past resemblance.” In isolation from the human flow, Lauren copes with her grief.
But a madman in the attic interrupts her solitude. A few days after Rey’s death, Lauren discovers a stranger living on the third floor of her house. What is uncanny about the man she nicknames Mr. Tuttle, after an inept high school science teacher, is how much his gestures and speech, though impaired, resemble Rey’s and how unresponsive he is to her efforts at communication. Is he an aphasic cursed with echolalia, a refugee from a mental hospital who is mindlessly mimicking a man he happened to see and overhear? Or has Mr. Tuttle slipped out of a different dimension, where time does not connect with language the way it does for those of us who live through stories? “Coming and going I am leaving,” he declares, in what seems like oracular gibberish. “I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left.”
Until he has left, Mr. Tuttle remains, like J.M. Coetzee’s Michael K, obdurately other, impervious to Lauren’s efforts to translate him into the coordinates of her experience. But in her approaches toward him, Lauren somehow reconciles herself to the loss of Rey. “Maybe,” she concludes when she finds herself alone again in the house, “it was all an erotic reverie.” Maybe Lauren is “an unstrung woman who encounters a person responsive to psychic forces, able to put her in touch with her late husband.” Or maybe the experience was the manifestation of another reality, one not defined by the depradations of time, one in which Rey–who told an audience at Cannes that, “The answer to life is the movies”–never dies.
“The Body Artist” could scarcely be a movie, but it does share elements with DeLillo’s two short published plays. “The Day Room,” first performed in 1986 and published in 1987, is an absurdist metadrama set in a bizarre hospital where it is impossible to distinguish the doctors from the patients. In “Valparaiso,” a two-act play performed and published in 1999, a man who sets out on a business trip to Indiana ends up in Florida and Chile simply through linguistic confusion; all three places contain towns named Valparaiso.
“The Body Artist,” too, might work as well on the stage as the page, a mystery play that is made of words and haunted by time. It is an impossible narrative about a widow who summons up a man who “lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality,” but, aside from that structural whimsy, the book lacks the humor found in DeLillo’s “White Noise.” And it lacks the intricate constructions and conceptions of his “Libra,” “Mao II” and “Underworld.” In autistic repetition, Mr. Tuttle steps outside the tyranny of linear time. DeLillo does not repeat himself, but to his growing body of literary art adds this bone to chew on.
