The Body Artist
by Don DeLillo
Scribner

Nearly four years have passed since Don DeLillo published his 11th novel, "Underworld." A Great American Novel of mind-numbing scope, the epic book offered something for everyone, be it baseball, large-scale art installations, Lenny Bruce, conspiracy theorists, marital infidelity or toxic waste.

A slim, breezy, 124-page title with large, airy type, "The Body Artist" is no "Underworld." It trades in that book's dramatic scope for a female artist, her dead husband, a Webcam and a strange little man who might be a ghost. That's about it.

Which isn't to say "The Body Artist" lacks substance. DeLillo's wonderful knack for description and dazzling observations of daily minutiae are on display throughout the novel, particularly in the virtuoso first chapter, whose only flaw is the high expectations it generates. Take the opening paragraph:

Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.

This is terrific prose, and the remainder of the first chapter's account of breakfast follows suit, as DeLillo catalogs the thoughts of Lauren Hartke — the body artist of the title — while she shares a breakfast with Rey, her new film-director husband who's almost twice her age.

What Lauren doesn't know is that once the meal is over, her husband will hop in the car, drive to his ex-wife's house and shoot himself in the head, a course of events DeLillo indirectly relates in a newspaper obituary between chapters 1 and 2.

The remainder of the book occurs after Rey's funeral when Lauren returns to the summer home to be alone and put her life back together. There, in an unused room, she discovers a strange, seemingly ageless, child-like man.

The little man, whom Lauren names Mr. Tuttle after a former high school teacher, is a fascinating character. He speaks in clipped, nonsensical phrases. Lauren becomes obsessed with Mr. Tuttle. The relationship between Lauren and the shuffling Mr. Tuttle is as heady as any found in DeLillo's heavier works, but this one is harder to crack.

It's almost as if DeLillo has too-successfully conveyed the emotional vulnerability and scattered-to-the-four-winds emotions that accompany grieving. Lauren's thoughts for much of the book are the sort of disjointed mental rants and diversions that accompany being preoccupied with bottomless, painful loss. When Lauren sits down for a conversation with Mr. Tuttle, the dialogue has all the power of a roundtable chat with Yoda, Tolkien's Gollum and "Twin Peaks'" Little Man from Another Place. Simply put, it's gibberish.

She whispered, "Tell me something."

He uncrossed his legs and sat with a hand on each knee, a dummy in a red club chair, his head turned toward her.

"I know how much." He said, "I know how much this house. Alone by the sea."

He looked not pleased exactly but otherwise satisfied, technically satisfied to have managed the last cluster of words. And it was in fact, coming from Mr. Tuttle, a formulation she heard in its echoing depths. Four words only. But he'd placed her in a set of counter-surroundings, of simultaneous insides and outsides. The house, the sea-planet outside it, and how the word alone referred to her and to the house and how the word sea reinforced the idea of solitude but suggested a vigorous release as well, a means of escape from the book-walled limits of the self.

She knew it was foolish to examine so closely. She was making things up. But this was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases.

She said, "I like the house. Yes, I want to be here. But it's only a rental. I am renting. I will be out of here in six or seven weeks. Less maybe. It's a house we rented. Five or six weeks. Less," she said.

This is decent on its face, but what works in the short version is a tedium in the long one. It's annoying to read so many repeated words in such a short, long-anticipated book. To a small extent, the reader comes to share Lauren's fascination with Mr. Tuttle and his origins. But a share of Lauren's annoyance and frustration with Mr. Tuttle come right along with it. Fortunately for the reader, the book's grating dialogue is peppered with DeLillo's trademark musings on everyday life, and the last 20 pages match the greatness of the first 30.

It's not a bad little book, "The Body Artist." Along with the famous most-photographed-barn scene in DeLillo's 1985 novel, "White Noise," the first chapter and obituary are probably the closest thing to DeLillo 101 the uninitiated reader is likely to find. And the oh-so-subtle manipulations of time the author pulls off don't fully strike you until you go back and read it again. "The Body Artist" is deservedly one of the most-talked-about books of the first half of 2001, and is exactly what's needed to whet our appetites for the next DeLillo.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)