a “body artist,” with no further explanation.

The second chapter, like the first, begins with a brief narrative not connected directly to the main story. In this second-person account of “you” driving along a highway, almost everything you see seems as though it is happening or appears as if it was something else. The opening of chapter 6 is another second-person account of “you” dropping a paperclip, at first not realizing you had dropped it, then having it disappear when you reach down to pick it up. Chapter 7 opens with a single sentence, again in the second person, in which “you” see a dead squirrel that turns out to be a strip of burlap, but nevertheless you feel terror and pity. These brief passages remind the reader—drawn into the narrated experiences by the use of “you”—that the world can be interpreted in different ways and that things that do not exist can still evoke emotion.

At the beginning of chapter 2, Lauren returns to the house, taken on a six-month lease, that was the only place in which she and Rey had lived together while married. During her first days back, she hears again the peculiar noise that she heard in the first chapter. She traces the noise to a bedroom and finds a man, wearing only white underwear and a T-shirt, perhaps meant to evoke the image of a blank canvas on which the body artist will work. DeLillo writes that with this man’s appearance, all of Lauren’s perceptions were sorted and endorsed, but it is unclear what perceptions are being referred to and how the appearance of this man endorses them. Lauren may have imagined the noise the first time she heard it (Rey had not), or the man might have been hiding in the house for weeks, or he might not have been the source of the noise in the first chapter.

The man speaks oddly and as though English is not his native language. Lauren speculates whether he is mentally retarded or mentally ill and that he might have escaped from an institution, but she lets him stay. When she looks at him, she finds it hard to register his features, and it seems to her that everything he does is done “as if.” All of this is fodder for speculation by the reader that the man is not real, that Lauren, the body artist, is making him up as she goes along.

The man is unable or unwilling to reveal his name, so Lauren calls him Mr. Tuttle, the name of one of her teachers in high school. (The name may be another clue from the author: in one episode of the television show M*A*S*H, the characters create a fictitious officer to do good deeds; his name is Captain Tuttle.) Lauren encourages Mr. Tuttle to talk, and she tape-records their conversations. She is struck by the way he mixes tenses—past to future to present—within a single sentence; he seems to have no sense of time. Mr. Tuttle begins to repeat things Lauren and Rey had said to one another, using imitations of their voices, and he makes a hand gesture that she recognizes as Rey’s, supporting the theory that Mr. Tuttle is in fact Rey’s ghost. Lauren speculates that Mr. Tuttle learned the voices and phrases by listening to tape recordings she and Rey had made while working on his autobiography, and she dismisses the hand gesture as coincidental, or perhaps partly her own fabrication. It is also possible that Mr. Tuttle had observed Rey and Lauren while hiding in the house.

The day after Mr. Tuttle appears to Lauren, he communicates that he will regain possession of himself through her—again, the idea that the body artist will use him as material. When she asks if he ever talked to Rey, he answers enigmatically, “I know him where he was.”

Lauren keeps Mr. Tuttle hidden from others, so there is no outside verification of his existence. As Lauren wonders about Mr. Tuttle’s past, she begins to remove traces of herself, waxing her armpits and legs to remove hair, exfoliating dead skin in a variety of ways, and cutting off some of her hair, then bleaching out the color of the rest.

One evening, Lauren finds Mr. Tuttle in the bathtub. She bathes him, and during the bath, a hair from a washcloth enters her mouth, reminiscent of the hair she discovered in chapter 1. The most straightforward explanation for the mysterious hair in the first chapter is that Mr. Tuttle, while hiding in the house, had visited the kitchen sometime when she and Rey were gone. Another possibility is that the hair was Lauren’s premonition of events to come.

When Mr. Tuttle recites both halves of the last conversation Lauren had with Rey, she senses that Rey is alive in Mr. Tuttle. As DeLillo describes the scene, she then crawls across the floor to him and tries to pull him down to keep him there, or she crawls up onto him or into him, or she lies prone and sobs, watched by herself from above. The contradictory “or” statements allow Lauren—and the reader—to interpret the scene in a variety of ways.

Lauren begins to think that Rey is not alive in Mr. Tuttle’s walking, talking continuum. After using that word in her mind, she thinks of it as a continuous whole, with arbitrary division into past, present, and future the only way to distinguish one part from the other—exactly what Mr. Tuttle is unable to do. She thinks of people as made out of time, which defines their existence. As she listens to tape recordings of her conversations with Mr. Tuttle, she finds him speaking words, in her voice, that she would speak later; in response, she ponders the idea of predestination.

One day, Mr. Tuttle disappears. Lauren telephones various mental health institutions for two days and finds out that someone matching Mr. Tuttle’s general description was admitted to one of them, but she never follows up on the call.

Between chapters 6 and 7 is a news story featuring an interview with Lauren and a description of her performance piece. Lauren is revealed to be thirty-six years old, leading the reader to wonder why she would have married Rey, a man nearly twice her age. The news story also sheds light on the description of her, in Rey’s obituary, as a “body artist.” In her performances, she creates various people out of herself, from an ancient Japanese woman to a naked man reminiscent of Mr. Tuttle, trying to communicate something that no one can understand.

When Lauren returns to the house after her run of performances, she sees Mr. Tuttle in mirrors, but never directly. As she undresses one night, she sees a figure sitting on the edge of the bed in the next room, just as she had first seen Mr. Tuttle. She knows what will happen later because it already has happened: they will have slept and gone to breakfast, as in chapter 1. This time, however, she will have gone out to his car, taken his keys, and hidden them or hammered them out of shape or eaten them or buried them in the ground—all possibilities that might have prevented Rey from driving away to Manhattan, and thus prevented him from killing himself. She decides not to enter the room and let it happen that he is there. Instead, she opens the window to feel the tang of the sea air and the flow of time in her body, telling her who she is.

Thus the novel ends. Instead of revealing one identity, that of Mr. Tuttle, the narrative destroys another, that of Lauren. The reader is left wondering how the body artist will recreate herself and which of many possible realities to believe, and perhaps to ponder the meaning of existence outside the covers of this book.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 97 (October 1, 2001): 292.

Esquire 135 (February, 2001): 38.

Library Journal 126 (January 1, 2001): 152.

The New York Times Book Review 106 (February 4, 2001): 12.

Publishers Weekly 247 (November 20, 2000): 43.

DeLillo's project looks much like Lauren's own, as he strips his novel of excess and frivolous language, just as she rids herself of the excesses and impurities of her own body. His language is more attuned to a philosophical exploration than his usual work; his bare, haunting prose reflects his shift from a cultural and historical query to a metaphysical one. His earlier novels use humor and wit and irony in their examination of American culture, and their scope of inquiry is much different. In The Body Artist, the humor and irony are gone, and we are left with thoughts and feelings alone. In what seems like an attempt to slow down time, or at least view isolated moments of it, DeLillo pulls together images and thoughts, often from Lauren's point of view, or something close to it. The narration is in third person, but the information and the way in which it is conveyed is so personal and so intrinsic to Lauren that it seems as if it were told in first person. It feels as if there is no marker that divides Lauren's thoughts from general descriptions, and the fusion between the two creates interiority that functions throughout the story. This perspective, moving in and out of one person's mind, gives DeLillo the freedom to examine one character's experience of time and yet deal with it in a somewhat universal way. With similar results, DeLillo employs rhetorical questions to a great extent, imitating both the kind of emotional exploration that individuals undergo when interpreting their own experience and the philosophical process that attempts to view questions from a distance, a kind of outside perspective.

This outside experience is directly shared in two chapters of the novel. The first is the section written in the form of Rey's obituary, and the second is the chapter in which the reader discovers more about Lauren through a magazine interview written by her friend Mariella Chapman. The styles of writing are fused together and seen from Lauren's point of view. In this way, DeLillo incorporates the other media into his story, and in the relation of necessary information and plot details that prevents the loss of the inferiority of the pages surrounding these two chapters, he suggests the way in which the multiple media which surround us are absorbed into the daily narrative of our lives. The difference between the form of the media and Lauren's experience is clear, but in a way, collapsed, which conveys like the rhetorical questions and certain perspective, expresses a unique vision of an individual's experience of time and space.

The Body Artist is a slim volume, but it attempts to cover broad topics, such as perceptions of time, the process of memory and coping with death. These three areas all concern intensely personal situations, so discussions might draw on personal experience as well as DeLillo's text. DeLillo has tackled big issues before, but none of his significant works thus far use the intimate approach that DeLillo employs in this novella.

1. DeLillo includes two chapters that depart stylistically from the narration and take the form of an obituary and a news or magazine article. What is the significance of the two different forms? What does including them affect the way we read that information? Why do you think DeLillo would choose to do this?

2. DeLillo, through Mariella's article, spends a fair amount of time placing Lauren within the context of other performance artists. Why? How does that affect your understanding of her performance? Also, the article is the only place in which a full description of Lauren's performance is given. Why do you think he does this? Does that affect the significance of her performance? The way we interpret it?

3. Consider the scene in the kitchen that starts the novel. What do you think DeLillo is doing in this scene? How do you think he is trying to convey time? Do you think he is successful? Can you imagine experiencing time in this way?

4. Often when a story is told from the first person perspective, or the protagonist's thoughts are constantly shared with the reader, it leads the reader to identify with the protagonist. Do you think this is what DeLillo was trying to accomplish? Was he successful? Do you identify with Lauren?

5. How would you characterize the relationship between Lauren and Mr. Turtle? How does it work to enhance the themes of the novel? Do you think this was an effective way to approach these themes?

6. The Body Artist is not written as a journal or diary, but does suggest the form in its interiority and personal nature. Have you ever, or do you now keep a journal? Why do you keep it? Does it share any similarities with The Body Artist?

7. Look at White Noise, which is another novel by DeLillo that involves a character coming to terms with death. How do the novels compare? Is DeLillo's style different between the two books? If so, how does that affect the way we think about the way he approaches the idea of death? How does the difference in tone affect the way you read and interpret the books?

In The Body Artist, Don DeLillo departs from the style and length he is known for as a result of the novel Underworld, his tour de force, and turns to the form of a novella, for an exploration into perceptions of time, identity constructions, and coping with death. The story begins in the kitchen of a resort house, where Rey Robles and his wife Lauren Hartke, the body artist of the title, are eating breakfast. Their words and movements overlap, not quite meshing, but playing out a certain choreography, revealing ease in a relationship between two people each comfortable in their own individuality. Following this chapter we learn through the format of Rey's obituary, that after breakfast, Rey had driven to the city and committed suicide in his first wife's bathroom. When Lauren returns to the rented house to work and mourn Rey's death, she comes upon a stranger living in a spare bedroom in the house. Through their relationship, and then through her art, Lauren works through the grieving process, and she, like DeLillo's readers, gains a closer understanding of her own impressions of reality and time, and the process of dealing with loss and loneliness.

The plot is spare because the real concern of the book lies in Lauren's thoughts and experiences. The bulk of the story revolves around Lauren's attempts to understand the man living in her house and how she feels about their interactions, and in so doing understand her past life with Rey and how she can adjust to living without him. While she is dealing with her grief over his death, she is also getting ready to execute a performance piece in an upcoming show. Her preparations for it involve a ritualized process of stripping away, as she attempts to make her body a blank slate. She bleaches her hair, depigments her skin as much as she can, scrubs and cuts and cleans and removes to rid herself of her own individual characteristics. This process is part of her aesthetic sensibility; for her work to be successful, the audience must not make the connection to the artist, but to the art and to what she is attempting to make them feel about time and space and identity. In her preparations for the piece and the choreography of it as well as in her daily life with the man in her house, whom she names Mr. Tuttle, she attempts to strip away the surface to get at the core underneath—at the time that makes up existence, the part of personality that is immutable, the humanity that might be uncovered, perhaps the memory that explains. By using her relationship with Mr. Tuttle, she does this for herself, and through her performance, she does it for herself and for her audience.

The name of her piece, "Body Time", is significant, for it is time that the book concerns itself with most. Lauren claims that she wants the audience to experience time, and this, in part, is what DeLillo is doing with his own work. Throughout the novel, Lauren's perceptions are related slowly, explored leisurely, as she works them out, and her discovery of Mr. Tuttle furthers this process. He is also a kind of blank slate, possibly mentally disabled, or psychologically hurt. She first finds him sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear, and his mind seems to be just as bare and nondescript. After she talks to him for a while, he begins to repeat conversations that Lauren and Rey had had days and weeks before he committed suicide. Lauren tapes the conversations that she and Mr. Tuttle have, and then listens to them again and again, trying to figure out what she meant then when she first spoke the words with Rey, and what she means now, with Mr. Tuttle. He allows her to re-experience the time she spent with Rey and attune her senses more fully to both her past and present reality, which in turn, allows DeLillo to consider certain metaphysical questions, like the nature of time and memory.

In interviews, it is common for DeLillo to mention that he has been influenced more by European films, Abstract Expressionism, and jazz than any particular authors or literary style. His emphasis on jazz, which played a major role in his development as a person as well as an artist, seems to be especially relevant for The Body Artist. In the novel, the narrator's observations and Lauren's thoughts are like a piece of jazz— words intertwine, interact, and test each other's limits. Jazz is the music that plays with time, and jazz's manipulations of time seem similar to DeLillo's own imaginings and expressions of it throughout the story.

DeLillo's novel, with its emphasis on the profound experience of the everyday, seems to fit well within a grouping that includes John Cheever and Raymond Carver. The former's focus on suburban settings and everyday life shares the idea of a kind of personal catastrophe within a prosaic setting; the latter's emphasis on isolation and loneliness and the use of nothingness to explore life and living seems to express an especially rewarding connection. Likewise, DeLillo is often categorized as a postmodernist writer, and most of his earlier works fit easily into this classification. The Body Artist fits as well, considering its emphasis on identity construction and the way in which Mr. Tuttle simulates the conversations between Lauren and Rey, but the vague, ethereal language employed in this novel departs somewhat from the typically ironic, forward style of others. Postmodernist writers, like Thomas Pynchon and John Barthelme cover similar issues, but in a style that echoes DeLillo's earlier work more clearly than The Body Artist.

Don DeLillo has published a wide range of work, including eleven other novels, two plays and a number of short stories and essays. He is best known for the massive novel Underworld, published in 1997, which explores, after a simple beginning of a story of a baseball game, history, war, and technology and its effects on America and Americans. The Body Artist's spare descriptions and emphasis on the philosophical rather than the historical or cultural drastically separates it from Underworld and much of DeLillo's other work. Like Underworld, much of his other novels explore America and its culture and history, unlike The Body Artist, which restricts itself to an exploration of one woman's impressions of reality. White Noise (1985) is somewhat similar to The Body Artist, as it deals primarily with its protagonist's relationships with his wife and coworkers and his own fears of death. That novel centers on a University professor and his family and their experience with an unknown, noxious cloud that invades their community. While similar in its exploration of the protagonist's personality and his thoughts about death and his place in his family, it does so in a humorous way and does not reach the level of interiority that The Body Artist achieves, with its clear focus on Lauren's thoughts. As DeLillo himself mentions in an interview, many of his novels tell the story of an individual adrift, lost in a vast sea or facing some superstructure that threatens his or her very being. While clearly true for novels like Underworld and White Noise, the same might be said, albeit in a more abstract way, about The Body Artist. Lauren is adrift in her own experiences, attempting to find an approach to understanding the nature of time and the specter of death.

An audio version of The Body Artist, read by Laurie Anderson, is available on cassette tape and CD, from Simon & Schuster Audio, and as a download at Audible.com.