Bibliofreakblog

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo

I finished this one a week or two ago, but I had to let my brain digest it for a while.

For the first three quarters of the book, I pretty much hated it.  It was slow, so slow it was draining just to read it.  

And it was written in weird post-modern prose.  The kind where for the first page or two you’re like, wow, I wish I could write like that and then by the time you’re half way through the first chapter you’re like, thank God I don’t write like that, it’s tedious as hell.

The first chapter painstakingly describes the morning breakfast of a man and wife.  It’s full of things like getting up, forgetting what you want, sitting down, remembering, etc, with bits of pretty philosophy thrown in here and there.  The woman discovers a strange hair.  Two pages go by, and then it talks about the hair again.

Mostly it concerns the taste, or nontaste of cereal, the need to buy Ajax at the store, the rustling heard in the walls, etc.

The second chapter is an obituary.  The man has died, and thankfully, we are free of this style of narrative, at least for a spell.

But then no, we’re back to it, and the very strange man who appears in the woman’s house.  He is able to mimic the man’s voice perfectly, and it freaks out the woman, who is the body artist of the title, as she mourns and prepares for her next show.

The man speaks in strange tenses.  He tells her that it rained, and she corrects him saying that it is going to rain, that it hasn’t rained yet.  He tells her that she did not leave, but she says that she will in a few weeks.

O.K., I’m going to get all spoilery here, because there is no way to tell you why I ended up liking the book so much.

The second to last chapter is another newspaper story, this time a review of the body artist’s show.  It describes how she is able to perfectly imitate different characters, transforming herself from an old Asian woman to what seems to be the strange man in the house.

The show is described as being slow to the point of pain.  But that’s the point.  And here I finally see that it was the point of the entire freaking book, though thank God it’s a novella.

The last chapter, she still doesn’t really know where the man came from.  But now she looks like him, as she has cut off and bleached her hair for her performance.  At the very end, she sees herself making love to her husband, and then she jumps out the window.

I couldn’t find much lit crit on it online, so here’s my theory, which seemed so very very obvious to me, but is unconfirmed.  The woman is the strange man.  She’s pulled a Billy Pilgrim and become unstuck in time.  She, the body artist, became the strange man and fell back in time to the night before her husband died.  It’s her hair in her breakfast cereal, and she was the one making the noises they heard.  

Now, what happens to the man that she has become after she goes back in time, I have no idea.

Buy The Body Artist on Amazon 

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Nowhere Man by Aleksander Hemon
The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster
The Double by Jose Saramago 
Beyond Grief And Nothing: A Reading of Don Delillo by Joseph Dewey

Other works by Don DeLillo:

Great Jones Street 
Libra
Point Omega
Americana 
Mao II
White Noise
Ratner’s Star
The Day Room
Running Dog
Underworld 
Cosmopolis
End Zone
Valparaiso: A Play
Love-Lies-Bleeding: A Play
Players
Falling Man
The Names