The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
David Seed

Don DeLillo. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001. 125pp. $22.00.

This taut drama makes a startling contrast with the historical spread of Underworld. The action centers on a couple and then a widow living in a large frame house in an unnamed village on the American coast. The first section describes the negotiations between a film director and his wife over holding a meaningful dialogue, which turn into a meditation by the wife on experiential authenticity. In the second chapter we are given news reports of the director’s suicide and descriptions of his technique which bear implicitly on the novel itself: “His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement.” That is exactly what happens in The Body Artist, where the widow Lauren returns to the house to try to reconstruct her life after the death. As she explores the upper floors she finds a man who has been sleeping there for some time and engages him in conversation in order to understand where he comes from. His replies are so cryptic, however (“I know how much this house. Alone by the sea”), that each encounter becomes a struggle to impose meaning on his words. As these attempts gradually fail, DeLillo places more emphasis on Lauren’s nonverbal skills. She is the body artist of the title and uses her dancing as a way of consciously existing in time. While this gives her a structure, Lauren’s identity remains elusive and shifting. One reviewer sums up her performances by stating: “She is acting, always in the process of becoming another or exploring some root identity.” To the very end of the novel this process remains enigmatic and inconclusive, but DeLillo keeps our interest through the unpredictable twists and turns of Lauren’s thoughts. [David Seed]