From Powells.com
The opening chapter of Don DeLillo's massive Underworld
ties a 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers to the beginnings
of both the Cold War (the game was played on the same day the Soviets exploded
their first atomic bomb) and of the peculiar paranoia, epitomized in the figure
of J. Edgar Hoover, that characterized the era. Arguably the most ambitious novel
of the nineties, Underworld made sweeping connections across vast spaces
and over decades of time. In the first chapter of his next novel, The Body
Artist, a husband and wife have breakfast together. Through the couple's ritualized
bickering and evasions, DeLillo reveals their essential isolation and claustrophobia.
Where Underworld was epic, The Body Artist is intimate. Where the
former explored the movement of the entire culture, the latter explores the personal
experience of one individual. It was as though Michelangelo, after completing
the Sistine Chapel, had turned around and taken up needlepoint. However, though
readers were surprised by the extreme contrast between the two novels, they actually
have more in common than is apparent at first glance: both deal with the dehumanizing
effects of modern technology on human life; both are written in the clean, evocative
prose that has made DeLillo one of the world's most celebrated stylists; and both
demonstrate that DeLillo is not only one of our greatest writers, but also one
of our most versatile. What Martin Amis wrote after reading Underworld
is equally true of The Body Artist: It "may or may not be a great
novel, but there is no doubt that it renders DeLillo a great novelist." Farley,
Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Review
"A tiny, intimate metaphysical ghost story by a master creator of huge, panoramic fiction; it concerns a woman alone in a large seaside house, where a strange man appears in an unused room. DeLillo's pinpoint prose copes with big themes, like the structure of time and the artist's approach to calamity." The New York Times Book Review, Summer Reading 2001 selection
Review
In "The Body Artist", DeLillo inhabits the quiet world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the corporeal. She is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man with uncanny knowledge of Lauren's own life. 125,000. print.
About the Author
This is Don DeLillo's twelfth novel. His fiction has won many honors in this country and abroad, including the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel, Underworld.