DeLillo makes sure we never find our footing. After spending 20 pages on a couple breakfasting in a rented summer cottage, he gut-punches us with an obituary–his way of telling us that the man we just met over breakfast has killed himself. The rest of the story belongs to Lauren, the wife, a performance artist who shape-shifts into other characters. Alone in the vacation house, she finds an intruder, a strange, gentle man whose conversation consists of dialogue he’s overheard, including whole sentences spoken by Lauren’s late husband. Was he in the house all along? Is he a medium? A psychotic? But turning him out, or turning him in, means giving up her husband’s voice, that last link. So why not court disaster? “Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin?”
Unlike DeLillo’s last few novels, which have concerned themselves with public issues–the psychology of crowds, the Kennedy assassination–“The Body Artist” focuses on humbler but knottier facts of life: the fragility of identity, the nature of time, the way the words we employ in the face of death have become so worn to the point of transparency. It isn’t always clear where DeLillo is heading in this elliptical book, but watching him find fresh ways to make words matter, we know, without a scrap of doubt, that this is the work of a masterful writer.
The Body ArtistDon DeLillo (Scribner) 124 pages. $22
