Tim Adams
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo (Picador)
Three years ago, with Underworld, Don DeLillo exploded the scope of the contemporary novel. He proved that it could fuse historical stringency with Cold War paranoia; could provide an arena for our techno-dreams and urban myths. His book was an 827-page manifesto for the sweep of the late 20th-century imagination, and, as Martin Amis observed, his voice “suddenly filled the sky”.
He has followed that mushroom cloud of literary energy with something small and, by comparison, very nearly mute. The Body Artist feels like a wilful contraction, almost an aftershock of humility. It returns this most daring of writers to first principles: how to construct sentences that properly describe the world; how to build a syntax adequate to extremes of emotion. If Underworld required the reader to think of James Joyce, The Body Artist brings to mind, in the wariness of its prose, Samuel Beckett. Having spent most of his writing life revealing what of the present moment language might nail down, DeLillo here examines the substance of experience it can only grope towards.
He achieves this through the semi-detached voice of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist. The book opens with her making breakfast for her husband, a film director. The couple have rented an old house for six months, and everything has a new-lit, scoured quality. Lauren finds unlikely intensity in domestic ritual: little haiku in the rinsing of blueberries or in watching her husband light his morning cigarette. She feels herself “hyper-prepared, or haywire, or hair-trigger”. Instinct suddenly requires prompts: “she took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it”, she observes of herself, third person; or, “she remembered to smile”. As she reads the newspaper she drifts in and out of the distant lives it reports.
Though she does not know it, this will be the last morning Lauren spends in this state. Catastrophe will follow, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with Lauren’s attempts to deal with the consequences.
DeLillo’s characters have often been super-sensitive to the aura and nuance of everyday objects. Here he rounds on that quality, makes it his subject. Lauren needs to reconstruct her life into a narrative, but it refuses cause and effect.
The author returns a persistent theme to the dehumanising effects of technology. Lauren becomes intrigued, for example, by the automated voice on an answering machine. She finds a metaphor for her loneliness on the Internet a fixed camera on a Finnish street in the middle of the night and watches “cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times”. She imagines pure DeLillo “that someone might masturbate to this”.
In this state, ascetic and delusional, she becomes fascinated with, and unsure of, the boundaries of the self. The author has been criticised in the past for not creating “rounded” characters, though the precise point of his characterisation has often been to show an individual Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra is the prime example ?not as a fixed point, but a series of desperate and dissolving gestures. The Body Artist takes that idea to its logical extreme.
Lauren communicates with a boy she finds, unsure if he is a ghost or a “foundling”. At the heart of the novel are Lauren’s conversations with the boy, a kind of fragmentary pillow talk from beyond the grave, or from back in time. The boy is an “as if” he exists only in relation to other references, and in him time has slowed to a full stop.
DeLillo enjoys the possibilities of this suspension of reality. Here he focuses that sense on the personal and the intimate, brings it to bear on the strained moments in which selfhood might slip through our fingers. In doing so, he fumbles for something archetypal Cathy Earnshaw or Tennyson’s Mariana in her moated grange are not far from Lauren as she listens to her unreachable house guest “shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases”.
“I write to find out how much I know,” DeLillo is fond of saying in his rare interviews. This is a book, more than any of his previous work, that confronts how much he doesn’t know, and the ways in which concentrated forms of thought might let you down. The result is a novel that is both slight and profound, a distilled meditation on perception and loss, and a poised, individual ghost story for the 21st century.