After releasing the gargantuan Underworld in the late 1990s, novelist Don DeLillo has chosen to write at much shorter lengths. 2001’s
The Body Artist is the first of these slimmer books. Indeed, it is often categorized as a novella due to its 128 pages of large type.

Lauren Hartke is the eponymous "body artist", a performance artist who, as the book opens, is enjoying peaceful domestic bliss with her much older husband Rey Robles, a film director whose best work was done decades before. This prologue captures some of DeLillo's perennial concerns, such as how American life is strongly defined by the products consumers buy. However, Rey dies soon afterward, and the storytelling turns mysterious as Lauren encounters a stranger in the spacious house that she and Rey had been renting out in the country.

Is this a ghost story? Lauren's encounter with a bum or escaped lunatic? Her own hallucination? The reader is led to weigh the evidence, but it is not certain that DeLillo wants there to be one single ultimate interpretation. The book reminded me strongly of Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, a similar story of two people in a country house where one may only be the projection of the other.

The Body Artist is touching for its observation that so much of a married person's being is formed by the corporeal presence of his or her partner, and when they go we too lose something. It also shows that DeLillo was ready to move on stylistically after too many novels where the characters, however different, speak the same inane Seinfeld-like dialogue about the minutiae of American life. However, I feel this could have been trimmed a bit more, and DeLillo's editor may have shirked this duty so that the novella would be viable as an independent publication. The use of two items meant to seem external to the story, namely newspaper articles of DeLillo's own conception, is rather clumsy. Still, it's a slim volume and is worth a try if you've enjoyed earlier DeLillo books.

First of all, it is a book that, even while reading it I knew that I would re-read it at least once.
Funnily enough, I find it difficult to choose the right words to express what this short novel evokes in me. I'm certain that if I tried to describe it, I would sound as incoherent as the dialogues between the characters. The incommunicability which is accentuated in the novel through what appear to be random sentences and random exchange of thoughts, in my opinion, represent the shattered aspect of the realtions between people. It seems that we are faced with individuals, each of them having ideas of their own, noy paying, or not being able to pay, attention to the other one. Each person lives in their own universe and the time is the one which connects the dotsm the past, the present and the future...

It's a good job The Body Artist is short, because I starting reading it before I was hit by a car. I promptly forgot everything I had read, and re-read the whole thing. But with concussion, so I can't say it made the most sense. Still, it didn't feel worth a third read. A minute story about the wife of a man who commits suicide (I think, my brain still hurts) and her physical portrayal of his grief. In the middle a funny little man appears who communicates in their mimicked voices, and my messed up head couldn't figure out whether he was real or not. The whole thing was over so fast that I didn't really get the time to feel very much about it, and as a result it left me pretty cold.

The novel opens with a scene of a large breakfast. Nothing is happening, just a couple, Rey Robles and his third wife Lauren Hartke having their morning breakfast together. Did I tell you nothing was going on? No, this breakfast made up of "unspoken" or meaningless conversations and daily gestures that repeated slowly, classically, mechanically.
I turn the pages, forget about this "mind-blowing" breakfast and suddenly come across the obituary of Rey, a cult filmmaker of sixty-four who has just committed suicide (like me, I like "cult" cinema).
I dive back into this house which suddenly became empty. Rey is no longer there, Lauren remains, alone at her window, still gazing at the birds and thinking of her late husband. Alone? Not quite. She discovers in the house a squatter, plus quite a child, but not yet a man. Who is he? What does he do? In mourning, Lauren wishes to remain alone, to isolate herself from the outside world. However, when she tries to get in touch with this squatter, whom she arbitrarily named Mr Tuttle, she has the impression of hearing Rey's voice, her intonations and her gestures as a real copy. So I discover the central theme of his novel: mourning. A few days after the death of a loved one, what feelings predominate in Lauren's thoughts: grief, desolation, sadness, heartbreak. A new life will have to start for this still "young" woman.