Book Beat March 14 2001 (3)

In the fall of 1997, two great literary events changed the weather in American letters: Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Vonnegut claimed it would be his last novel and we read with delighted despair. Underworld placed DeLillo unequivocally in the line of succession from Barth, Pynchon and Vonnegut to the next generation of grand figures in this solitary discipline. For his part, DeLillo handed out, to both admirers and critics, cards printed with his spin on these matters: “I don’t want to talk about it.” His reticence was not merely the public imprimatur of an elusive artistic persona. Nor was it finally his writerly reflex to the hype that attended his name that season. It was his way of creating some narrative space for his next novel, The Body Artist.
This magical book is as intimate and contemplative as Underworld was expansive and declamatory. It is a kind of inverted ghost story in which Lauren Hartke, a performance artist grieving for her late husband, finds her home is haunted by a nameless stranger who speaks riddles and rhymes in her husband’s voice.
Together, they begin a series of exercises in which Mr. Tuttle (as she calls him) guides Lauren through the vortex of her memory, weaving into the echoes of her past, the sounds of her desperation, her cunning, her self-absorption, her affection and, at last, her loneliness. He plays back for her whole weeks of her private encounters, entire sequences of her interior struggles as a woman and a wife. And at that moment when she is most dependent upon Mr. Tuttle to relive and reinvent her lost life, he disappears. She is left to discern whether her life can go on without a substantial investment in both reality and fantasy. DeLillo is taking us back to the basic issues.
As a performance artist, Lauren transmutes her body into a blank page, filing her skin to an untextured surface, modulating her voice to become her characters’ secret monologues. She becomes the sum Tuttle of her ruin, the suburban specter of her mislocated desire. If it is unclear where Lauren ends and Mr. Tuttle begins or, indeed, whether that is even the correct question, then it is, at least, perfectly clear that DeLillo is pioneering some new fictive territory here, moving courageously beyond the tropes of magic realism and into a sustained meditation on the self as it would exist if it were some other thing.
Ending as abruptly as it begins, this fine little book is a user’s manual for the post-millennial psyche. And it is a fine articulation of the ultimate DeLillo project — to discover amid the dross of daily experience, the corpus of our lives.