The Body Artist

by Don DeLillo

Scribner, 2001

124 pages

Review by Chris Switzer

         In college, I studied English literature, and I’m not really sure why, either, because I never read the amount of great fiction that I should have. I admittedly skated by with only reading a handful of novels, most of them supplemented or completely replaced with Cliff Notes. As long as I could pass my courses with acceptable grades, I was satisfied.
         Somewhere along the way I forgot that I used to enjoy reading.
         About four years after graduating, a co-worker suggested that I read a novel that he considered to be one of his favorites. I mentally rolled my eyes at the thought of wasting my time with my nose in a book. He insisted that I look at it though, so, perhaps in an attempt to humor him, I borrowed it, with no intention of doing anything other than skimming the first few pages, then returning it. For four years, I had slogged through too much Victorian nonsense, most of which usually boiled down to plots about “women of virtue” fretting over whether to marry for love or for money; I was not about to suffer through any more so-called problems of the bourgeois crowd, so I tossed the book on my desk and it remained there for about a week. Finally, one day I flipped it open, just so I could say that I at least skimmed through it.
         I finished that novel in two days.
         The book was Don DeLillo’s White Noise ; that was the book that made me want to read again.
         So when I recently got my hands on a copy of The Body Artist , I felt the same rush of excitement I did when I first read White Noise . Reading Don DeLillo as a literary experience involves not only a transformation into someone else, but also a keen insight into the thought processes of the characters, who exhibit such bizarre nuances that they couldn’t be anything but real. Don DeLillo is truly a master of literature, and The Body Artist is more than ample evidence of that fact.
          The Body Artist starts out with Lauren Hartke living an uncomplicated, bohemian lifestyle with her husband Rey. They talk in a fragmented, uncensored, nonlinear fashion; replies are often unrelated to the original questions, sentences often trail into nothingness. This is the love that’s found in marriages of longtime couples – a deceptive love, one that masquerades as a mutual self-respect at the cost of any real communication. It’s not until Rey unceremoniously takes his own life at his first wife’s apartment that the extent of their broken communication is apparent.