Dear Sarah,
You ask, sensibly enough, whether I, a recently widowed contortionist, would tolerate the presence in my rented house (precisely located by the jacket copy on “a lonely coast”) of a skinny aphasic who has apparently been there for some time, eavesdropping on my conversations with my dead husband. I suppose this would depend on who I took this fellow to be. Baba ganouj is a tasty dip made of roasted eggplants, tahine, and lemon juice, but who, or what, is Mr. Tuttle?
Perhaps because she is numb with grief, perhaps because she’s just weird, or perhaps because DeLillo couldn’t summon the energy to supply her with a plausible motive, Lauren accepts the stranger’s presence without much resistance or curiosity. Though he clearly belongs to the literature of the uncanny, the man doesn’t inspire much dread, and the middle section of the book, as you suggest, has a slack, underimagined quality, as if the situation itself were meant to sustain our interest in the absence of any of the usual pegs–character, incident, description–upon which narrative attention is hung. “I am Lauren, but less and less,” she thinks to herself near the end of the book, but there never seemed to be all that much of her to begin with. Did it bother you that Mr. Tuttle’s disjointed, nonreferential way of talking seemed different from the other characters’ speech only in degree? Maybe that’s part of the point–that communication is a matter of missed connections and uncompleted thoughts–but in the opening chapter, in the phone conversation with Rey’s first wife and in Lauren’s late encounter with her landlord, I felt that DeLillo’s ear had faltered. I also found his attempts to evoke the natural world pretty weak: “There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay … The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.” What things? What sound? “Irreversibly” as opposed to what? I realize he’s setting up his big themes–being and time–in this opening passage, but the absence of concreteness in the language makes these themes less rather than more resonant.
I shared your annoyance at the inserted magazine profile (kind of like those “at lunch with” features our paper occasionally runs) that separates the novel’s middle from its end, just as Rey’s obituary separated the lovely opening from the middle. Both of these bits of mock journalism smuggle in a lot of information that the rest of the book is too rarefied to supply. In both cases–reading about Rey’s Spanish Loyalist parents, his childhood in the Soviet Union, his career as a filmmaker, or learning that Lauren’s was the child of an archeologist and a harpist, with a brother in the State Department–I thought to myself, hmm, that sounds interesting; I’d like to read a novel about these people, a Don DeLillo novel, for that matter.
It’s no doubt unfair to fault DeLillo for declining to write that novel and for choosing to strip his represented world down to its barest yogic quiddity. But I don’t think The Body Artist shows his best gifts as a prose artist. The Spartan lyricism he’s aiming for feels thin and portentous, lacking in focus, intensity, and feeling. The story unfolds not only outside of ordinary time, but its events seem to happen to nobody in particular and in no particular place. You mentioned yesterday that you found Underworld a little cold. In some ways it’s his most warm-blooded book, but like his other novels–the half-dozen I’ve read, anyway–it feels a little inhuman. His characters tend to be screens for ideas, intuitions, and cultural insights, but rarely do they exist in the full dimensions of flesh, blood, thought, and desire. It doesn’t seem surprising that, in paring characters down to their elemental selves–speaking bodies, moving through time–he should discover echoing emptiness and loss of particularity. But it’s not very convincing, either. Lauren’s visitor “violates the limits of the human.” Maybe so, but this statement would mean more if 1) it were something more than a statement, and 2) if we felt that the person making it–Lauren Hartke or Don DeLillo–had reached and breached those limits by pushing through dense thickets of human experience rather than simply dropping down in a half-mapped hinterland and expecting us to marvel at the imaginary scenery.
Until tomorrow,
Tony
