Dear Tony,
May we talk a bit more about the so-called Mr. Tuttle, the strange humanesque figure who pitches up in Lauren’s house after her husband’s suicide and whose relationship with her drives much of the book? I’ve been struggling to figure out what to make of him–or, more precisely, what to make of Lauren’s bizarre response to him. If you were a new widow, stricken with grief and wallowing in isolation to the point where you retreated to a secluded country house and only sporadically bothered to answer the phone, would you tolerate the continuing presence in that house of a highly peculiar man who could barely talk, except to spout strange nonsensical semiphrases and occasional snippets of dialogue you may have had with your dead husband? What’s more, would you buy him clothes, scrub his naked (and sexually unappealing) body in the bathtub, and then have sex with him? Why would you obsess over him–who he is, where he came from, what his problem is–rather than over your dead husband? At the same time, if you were looking for some sort of substitute for your husband in your time of loneliness and despair, would you choose this guy? Why not just pick up the phone book and call someone at random? You could hire him to behave weirdly, and then pay him to leave.
Mr. Tuttle, as you mention, disappears without warning, and Lauren makes a half-hearted effort to find out what became of him. We never know for sure except that someone at a nearby mental hospital reports of a recent admission whose description vaguely matches Mr. Tuttle’s. But it all becomes a bit clearer later on when Lauren’s friend Mariella interviews Lauren and writes about her performance piece in (I guess we’re never told) a local newspaper. (For the record, I did not enjoy reading this highly annoying fictional piece of journalism and thought it may have been a lazy mistake on DeLillo’s part to put it there–a way for him to perform the task of explaining who Lauren is and what her job consists of in one fell swoop without the bother of doing it properly. To look at it more charitably, maybe it was a way for him to leave the actual text of the novel unsullied, as it were, with all that dull exposition, keeping it mannered and pure and dreamlike and pitched in just the way he wanted). From this article, you learn that Lauren’s latest piece, “Body Time,” was publicized by word of mouth and performed in a “dungeon space”–I guess that means the basement–at a Boston arts center. You learn that what she does, besides all that yogaesque contortion, is to inhabit other people’s bodies and perform the parts of many characters in her pieces. (What is so radical about that, you’re thinking–isn’t that what a lot of performance artists do, or people like Tracey Ullman and, I don’t know, Anna Deveare Smith?) Here is Mariella describing the performance:
There is the man who stands in an art gallery while a colleague fires bullets into his arm. This is art. There is the lavishly tattooed man who has himself fitted with a thorn of crowns. This is art. Hartke’s work is not self-strutting or self-lacerating. She is acting, always in the process of becoming another or exploring some root identity. There is the woman who makes paintings with her vagina. This is art. There are the naked man and woman who charge into each other repeatedly at increasing speeds. This is art, sex and aggression. There is the man in woman’s bloody underwear who humps a mountain of hamburger meat. This is art, aggression, cultural criticism and truth. There is the man who drives nails into his penis. This is just truth.
Excuse me?
You also learn that at the end of the piece, Lauren becomes Mr. Tuttle, or as Mariella puts it, becomes “a naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something,” lip-synching to a voice on a tape recorder. (The low point of the interview for me is where Mariella writes: “I sit and wait. I nibble at my baba ghanouj. I look at Hartke. What is baba ghanouj?”) At the end of the interview, Lauren actually starts to speak in Mr. Tuttle’s voice, without lip-synching, raising the question that perhaps she was Mr. Tuttle all along. Or perhaps not–perhaps she is inhabiting him now the way he inhabited her and her husband, as a way to beat her way through her grief. In any case, before we find out the answer, she leaves to go to the bathroom and never comes back to the table.
The book was redeemed for me in part in its moving closing section, which I will talk about tomorrow. But now can I ask you, did all this middle stuff irritate you as much as it irritated me?
All best,
Sarah
