Dear Tony,
I’m doubly intrigued, after your lucid analysis of The Body Artist’s inadequacies, about your question on Monday: What would we think of this book if it had been written by someone other than Don DeLillo? Does he get special dispensation for his less –than great book because he’s a Great Writer? If we were editors who found this novel on our desks, submitted by an agent on behalf of a no-name client, would we send it back with the instruction, please do another draft–and by the way, lose that tedious character in the middle?
I’m now going to explain what redeemed the book for me. First, I wasn’t bothered, as you were, by the way his physical descriptions don’t necessarily add up. (In truth, sometimes they make no real sense.) I found much of the writing beautiful. I liked the way he can use language to create a sort of haze of impressions because that’s how perception can be.
I also admired his efforts to show the unreliability and imprecision of language, particularly in the minds of his characters, who spend much of their time struggling to know what they feel and to say what they mean. I think he went overboard–there was no need for the prosaic guy Lauren rents the house from to communicate, like everyone else, in Bush-speak. (“Been in the family. Let’s see, forever. But the upkeep,” he says, talking about the cost of heating the house.) But still, it was interesting, and he does have a point–few people speak in proper English, as I was reminded yesterday when I tried to take a long rambling soliloquy by a British agriculture official and find even three quotable sentences with, as an added bonus, actual verbs.
Finally, I found the last little section of the book–mercifully Tuttle-free–to be a truly moving portrait of the process of grief. A couple of years ago, when I was feeling particularly morose because of an illness in the family, I sought out books in which characters are deathly ill or in which loved ones die as a way to get out of my own head for a bit while still wallowing in what felt close to despair. So I was interested to see how DeLillo would use his writing to approach this most central of human dilemmas, how to go on living when those around you die.
Based on the slim autobiographical information we have about Lauren and Rey, her dead husband, the reader can imagine what their relationship must have been like: she, a fringe performance artist; he, a failed film director with a habit for divorce and, probably, a bitterness about the career in which he once thrived. He was a lot older than she was, so she probably admired him, looked up to him, maybe worshipped him. As we saw at the beginning, they hadn’t been married long, which means she was probably in love with him in that crazy, omnivorous way people are in new romances; but they were getting along badly. She tried to be cheery, to get him to talk–maybe she saw herself as his muse, the inspiration that would pull him from his grumpy stupor and free him to make more movies, but he was having none of it, so much so that he killed himself.
So what does Lauren do? As we’ve already discussed, she falls into a fugue, begins to eat indifferently, if at all; embarks on a bizarre time-wasting relationship with a cypher of a person; performs her art in a dungeon; chops all her hair off; and then walks out of an interview with her friend, an annoying journalist.
Then and here’s where it began to be poignant and not tiresome at all–she sets about healing herself. She tries to remember what Rey looks like and sees his image sometimes in mirrors around the house. She tries to remember what they said to each other and wonders what has become of her. “Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin?” she asks, which is the right question to ask.
And then:
Why shouldn’t his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteless bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.
And she does, until finally it dawns on her: Rey is not there and never will be again. She replays their last moments together, when he was looking for the keys to the car he would use to go to New York, giving it a new, wishful ending, showing an angriness that has been displaced and directed against herself until now:
They will already have slept and wakened and gone down to breakfast, where they muddle through their separate routines, pouring the milk and shaking the juice … It is the simplest thing in the world when she goes out to his car and takes his car keys and hides them, hammers them, eats them, buries them in the bone soil on a strong bright day in late summer, after a roaring storm.
And then she forgives herself, for his death and for other things. She opens the window and begins the simple process of living again: “She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.”
I thought that was heavenly. And here’s my final thought: What if DeLillo lost much of the middle section and put the first two sections together (with some minor expository tweaks and some deft editing)? It would be a long novella instead of a short novel, and it could well be a brilliant one. What do you think?
This has been great fun.
All best to you,
Sarah
