In the past three months I’ve read many books having the central plot element of a woman dealing with sorrow and loss, for example, Kitchen, The Curriculum Vitae of Aurora Ortiz, The Sin Eater, The House on Eccles Road, The Third Angel, and A Mercy. The women in these wonderful novels all react differently to loss. We all create our own ways out of our grief, our own delivery from the death of another. Our reaction and our device to survive rises up from our own history. What is behind us – significant events of our lives, people who have stayed and those who have passed through, worked-out (and changing) thoughts on religion and morality, songs and books and poems we’ve loved, and certainly, places that we’ve been (literally and metaphorically) determines how we respond to death. And it is always unique to the person.
With his short but gut-punch novel, The Body Artist, Don Delillo has come up with a truly unique device to alleviate the suffering of his protagonist, Lauren, the body artist. Lauren’s older husband Rey (much older, and with a twisted and complicated history) leaves her one morning at the house they have rented in some Northeastern coastal town. He drives away and will never return to that house. Or will he? Lauren is left alone in the old, rambling house that was always too big for the two of them and now is immense and empty. But is it?
And so begins almost a ghost story, with more than one ghost. There is the ghost of Rey: he is still in the house with Lauren, still there in time with her, his voice and gestures appearing again and again in the guise of an unexpected guest. Without loss, there is no loss: with Rey there, her husband is not gone, he is with her. But Lauren cannot control this ghost of Rey, much as she could not control Rey, although she tries by recording the voice of this ghost and imitating him with her own body — making a double of him, the ghost, to stand in for Rey, her husband. She also takes the ghost in hand, as if she were a mother, protecting him.
There is Lauren herself, ghost-like and haunted by her past words and actions, and seeking to obliterate herself: “She had a fade cream she applied just about everywhere, to depigment herself. She cut off some, then more of the hair on her head. It was crude work that became nearly brutal when she bleached out the color. In the mirror she wanted to see someone who is classically unseen, the person you are trained to look through, bled of familiar effect, a spook in the night static of every public toilet.”
Lauren wreaks control over dirt, body hair, dead skin, bacteria in her mouth, and over her body, moving her torso through contortions of control to become a different person, on a different plain: “[Lauren's ] body flails out of control, whipping and spinning appallingly. [Lauren] makes her body do things I’ve only sen in animated cartoons. It is a seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another.“ She is more than a ghost, she is a changeling, trying to alter her reality.
Most importantly, there is the ghost of time. Lauren will use time, in concert with the other ghosts of herself and of Rey, as her device to survive. Lauren plans “to organize time until she could live again” but time cannot be easily controlled: it folds over and back, moves ahead and then retreats. In the novel time moves forward but the narrative sequence also hints of looks backward, events recalled and replayed. Again, it is as if Lauren wants to obliterate time much as she wants to erase herself: without time, without body, no loss is suffered. “Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it.“ But without time, there would be no suffering at all.
The device of removing herself from the history itself, from time and place, removes Lauren from the sorrow that occurred as a result of her being in a certain place, at a certain time. But left unchecked, the process of removal will take everything away from Lauren and she has to abandon the device of removal for the eventual and inevitable acceptance that she is alone: “The room was empty….The bed was empty. She’d known it was empty all along but was only catching up.” Lauren places herself firmly back into time: “she wanted to feel …the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.”
The Body Artist is an amazing book, lyrical and haunting, and dense with ideas and images and desires. Ultimately, the desire to live is the strongest: Lauren has found her own way down through sorrow and grief, and rises back up again, to join the living.
