. Spinning .

As I had mentioned, the little man has little character, and the harder I want to believe in an ethereal, not-of-this world meaning to him, the harder it becomes to believe.  Same thing with Lauren, who I totally related to at the beginning in her sudden sense of loss and bewilderment yet intense need to comprehend. 

That night she stood outside his room and listened to him whimper.  The sound was a series of weak cries, half cries, dull and uniform, and it had a faint echo, a feedback, and carried a desolation that swept aside words, hers or anyone’s.

(…) He lay curled in a thin blanket.  She uncovered him and lay on top.  You are supposed to offer solace.  She kissed his face and neck and rubbed him warm.  She put her hand in his shorts and began to breathe with him, to lead him in little breathy moans.  This is what you do when they are scared.  (p. 90)

No, you don’t.  If it’s someone you love you might feel and understand the need for affirmation via sexual touch, but I’da been a whole lot happier if she held him close and stroked his head.  Nor did I feel the "You are supposed to offer solace" as a real and genuine emotion.  I suppose it was up to me to have decided by now what the little man is–a reality, that is, maybe an escapee from a mental institution as even Lauren herself wonders, or if he is a projection of her thoughts of her husband.  I’m still on the fence, and so this little scene makes me feel that she is taking advantage of a mental incompetent, even to the point of considering it abuse.  I mean, " she put her hand in his shorts?"

I’m also a bit disappointed in Lauren’s self-centeredness and narcissism:

She wax-stripped hair from her armpits and legs.  It came ripping off in cold sizzles.  She had an acid exfoliating cream, hard-core, prescribed, and after she stripped the hair she rubbed in the cream to remove wastepapery skin in flakes and scales and little rolling boluses that she liked to hold between her fingers and imagine, unmorbidly, as the cell death of something inside her.

She used a monkey-hair brush on her elbows and knees.  She wanted it to hurt.

She didn’t have to go to Tangier to buy loofahs and orange sticks.  It was all in the malls, in the high aisles, and so were the facial brushes, razors and oatmeal scrubs.  (p. eighty-four)

It goes on, for another half page like this, and though I realize she may be some sort of "body artist" so that some of this is obviously necessary to her, it seems to tell me why she may not have noticed much about her husband while he was alive, and is so determined to make something of the strange Mr. Tuttle that he may not be at all.

Hope to finish this book tonight–the whole book at 120 pages is really a two-hour read if one read straight through.

Even though I often change my mind as I read through a book, I sort of like posting my impressions as I go along rather than the usual review given after completing the reading.  As in my month-long reading of 100 Years of Solitude, our perspectives change as we read further into a story, although I know when I’m hooked from the start.

With The Body Artist, I am in fact liking it a bit less, and I probably would have hated it had I read something like this prior to my more learned comprehensive dealing with literature.  This, taken from the front coverleaf:

Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life.  Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time–time, love and human perception.

As the Seattle Times said of DeLillo’s last novel, "Masterpieces teach you how to read them."  The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.

While I would not argue with the skill of the author, I would apply the Pollack Principle to this novel.  It is almost that if you don’t understand it, it must be great and a following ensues.  Meanwhile, I wonder if the artist isn’t laughing at us. 

This strange little man has no great qualities except to spout back at Lauren memorized conversations from the past.  I feel it is similar to meeting someone who smiles knowingly, says little, and is branded deep and mysterious when in fact he may be a complete idiot.  Hey, even she calls him a geek and a "little creep".

However, if it turns out that this man is either a figment of Lauren’s imagination, a projection of her thoughts, it might be a fascinating look at the way we handle grief and guilt.  But I see no beauty here, at least at what comes from him, and I see no reason to extract a deep meaning about time and existence just because he suddenly showed up without knowing or revealing a past or having any thoughts of the future.  It is what she is interpreting from this visit, what Lauren is trying to justify or resolve that is of more importance.

And to quote from the above, "ageless man" — the dictionary definition is "never growing old."  We only have him for a brief time, what a couple weeks?  Does that prove agelessness?

And this, "a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life" — Well DeLillo has already given us the concrete possibility that much of what this man says is either taken from what the dead Rey had previously recorded on a tape recorder, or what Lauren herself has said.  Perhaps DeLillo is allowing us our own choice of taking the hard line of fact or suspension of belief.  Maybe that’s just as telling of the reader, and tells us more about ourselves than this strange little man.

Or maybe I’m just grumpy now that I’m officially a year older today.

First of all, it has become obvious that all of the clutter of routine detailed in the first chapter does indeed come back, perhaps as a symbol of continuity.  The birds at the feeder, Lauren’s tendency to place herself within the news articles she reads, etc.  So much of the story is dependent upon recalling those details, although whether I am missing their points I don’t know, since even in their reappearance I cannot connect a metaphorical meaning, unless as I say, it is as if things haven’t changed.

One brilliant move DeLillo has taken is in the form of simile.  While the book is loaded with very nice ones, the most skillful one is the description of the strange little man–Mr. Tuttle as Lauren has named him–as a simile in himself:

He moved uneasily in space, indoors or out, as if the air had bends and warps.  She watched him sidle into the house with a slight shuffle.  He feared levitation maybe.  She could not stop watching him.

It was always as if.  He did this or that as if.  She needed a reference elsewhere to get him placed.  (p. 45)

He came into the room then, edgingly, in his self-winding way, as if, as if.  (p. 78)

While Mr. Tuttle is not only odd looking, he speaks in a strange, disjointed and almost inappropriate way that doesn’t directly answer Lauren’s questions to him, but holds her interest by either his repetition of her or her dead husband’s past coversations, or things that she has tried to discuss with him.  It is almost as if he has digested and is regurgitating the important points of her life to consider. 

But when has a character ever been described as acting as if?  The question presents itself of what is he a simile for, what does he represent?  Is DeLillo clearly telling us that Mr. Tuttle is not real?  Yet there was an incident where he seemed all too much so, despite his very oddity.  She had taken him along when she goes to a shopping mall:

But when they got there, she left him strapped in his seatbelt and locked the car while she went to the electronics store and supermarket and shoe outlet.  She bought him a pair of shoes and some socks.  She bought blank tapes for the voice recorder, unavailable in town, and came back to the car with bags of groceries in a gleaming cart and found him sitting in piss and shit.  (p. 64)

One possibility of explanation comes from Mr. Tuttle in one of his more understandable utterings:

"I regain possession of myself through you.  I think like myself now, not like the man I became.  I eat and sleep like myself, bad, which is bad, but it’s like myself when I was myself and not the other man."  (p. 62)

This, Lauren recognizes as something her husband had said shortly after they were married.  So then, is Mr. Tuttle a simile for Rey?  Is his presence in her home there simply a case of him being as if Rey were still alive?  Or perhaps, the phrase, "I eat and sleep like myself, bad, which is bad, but it’s like myself when I was myself and not the other man." could be taken as the fact of Lauren’s returning to herself, single and alone herself, no longer, as often happens, becoming that one half of a couple and thinking as one or compromising and losing one’s own identity within the more dominant personality of one’s partner.

In the first chapter which followed Lauren and Rey around their kitchen and morning breakfast routine, DeLillo took pains to be specifically mundane in their routine, yet so detailed as to be almost aggravatingly boring.  Unfortunately, if one gave in to that, one might have missed certain cues that return in the days following as Lauren interrelates to the strange man who has suddenly appeared in the house after Rey’s suicide:

(…)and then the toaster thing popped and she flipped it down again because it took two flips to get the bread to go brown… (P. 8)  and What’s it called, the lever.  She’d pressed down the lever to get his bread to go brown.  (p. 9)

The toaster reappears as Lauren makes breakfast for the little man:

She’d fed him leftover soup and some bread, some toast.  You had to flip the thing twice to get the bread to toast properly.  (p. 44)

And a hair:

She picked a hair out of her mouth.  She stood at the counter looking at it, a short pale strand that wasn’t hers and wasn’t his.  (p. 10)

The hair remains in this opening scene for a while, instigates a conversation between Lauren and Rey:

"I always think this isn’t supposed to happen her.  I think anywhere but here."

He said, "What?"

"A hair in my mouth.  From someone else’s head."

"Do you think it happens only in big cities with mixed populations?"

"Anywhere but here."  She held the strand of hair between thumb and index finger, regarding it with mock aversion stretched to artistic limits, her mouth at a palsied slant.  "That’s what I think."  (p. 11)

But we find that the hair is in fact most likely from the strange little man whom Lauren has named Mr. Tuttle, after a former teacher of whom he reminded her.  And DeLillo gives us the answer in an intimate scene as Lauren walks into the bathroom where the little man is taking a bath, and proceeds to bathe him:

She felt something wispy at the edge of her mouth, half in half out, that could only be a hair.  She plucked at it and brushed with her thumb, a strand of hair from the washcloth, and she couldn’t feel it on her face anymore and she looked at him and looked at her hand and maybe it was just an itch.  (p. 69)

Likewise, though the item does not remain consistent, the tie with past and present, pre and post suicide is brought in with the radio she turns on and Rey turns off in link with the tape recorder she uses in her conversations with Mr. Tuttle and his persistent attempts to turn it off.

Obviously the noises in the house were a presage to Mr. Tuttle’s presence, but it is more difficult to formulate an idea of deeper meaning in the hair and the toaster in particular.  DeLillo had taken such care to describe them in the opening scene that it is impossible to miss them when they pop up again.  The hair could be taken merely as another cue of it meaning something–and as with the noise, it did turn out that the man was in the house somehow while Rey was still alive.

Curiouser and Curiouser.

DeLillo pushes the point on this, but we’re not left to our own devices except to decide the reliability of the narrator and the protagonist.  After her husband (Rey)’s death, Lauren finds a strange little man in one of the upstairs bedrooms.  Let me put in the encounter here, though I may repeat it for other reasons again:

She found him the next day in a small bedroom off the large empty room at the far end of the hall on the third floor.  He was smallish and fine-boned and at first she though he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear.  In the first seconds she thought he was inevitable.  She felt her way back in time to the earlier indications that there was someone in the house and she arrived at this instant, unerringly, with her perceptions all sorted and endorsed.  (p. forty-one)

In Chapter 1, there was foreshadowing of this in the noises heard by both Lauren and Rey within the house, with appropriate guesses at the source in this old homestead out in the country.  But her response, while she is somewhat in shock after her husband’s death, still seems calm.  However, just as we scream at the movie or television screen to the protagonist not to open the door, Delillo has foreseen this, and Lauren does question his presence and her course of reaction, although she’s fed and talked to him first:

She knew she would have to call hospitals and clinics, psychiatric facilities, to ask about a missing patient.  (p. forty-six)p. forty-six)

She said, "I came here to be by myself.  This is important to me.  I am willing to wait.  I will give you a chance to tell me who you are.  But I don’t want someone in my house.  I will give you a chance," she said.  "But I will not wait indefinitely."  (

She didn’t want it to sound like a formal warning, but it probably did.  She would have to call the nearest mission for the homeless, which wouldn’t be near at all, and maybe the church in town or the church with the missing steeple on Little Moon and she would have to call the police, finally, if nothing else worked.  (p. forty-seven)

Even if we do not allow ourselves to suspend belief as to the existence of this man, we have some confidence that Lauren is asking the right questions, following a plan of action that is believable under the circumstances.  So within this technique, DiLillo is also taking advantage of the opportunity for us to support his protagonist. 

Does she do any of these things she knows she should do?  No.  She might have if the little man was not quite so innocuous, and didn’t start speaking in halting language that resembled at first her own, then her husband’s words and speech pattern.  A bit frightening, yes; but if you’d just lost your husband to suicide, wouldn’t you also grab onto whatever might help you answer some of the inevitable questions?

That, I think, is verisimilitude.

I intend to more fully explain this new character, a strange little man who may not be a ghost who Lauren has found in an upstairs bedroom.  But I do want to read a bit further first.

But this seemed important to me to write down for my own purposes.  That the touch of the odd, the surreal and out of place that I’m finding in this novel as well as obviously in 100 Years of Solitude, has become a key unlocking a door in my writing mind that prissily has resisted the unreal in fiction.  Odd, because my early writings were mostly unrealities, horror stories, those that I liked to read–I wrote.  Whether life itself or age turned me against the allowance of dream within the structure of life and story, or whether it was just a predilection for truth, somewhere I became insistent upon purity of fiction in its possibilities.  How silly.  While I still enjoyed reading mysteries, I came to prefer the non-fictional stories based on real-life cases.  Slowly I transitioned away from freedom of mind to restrictions that became almost gestapoesque in its policing of what could be and what couldn’t.  The vulture of verisimilitude was hovering over my head in all that I wrote.

But with this book following Marquez and beginning perhaps with Paz’s short story, The Wave, I am beginning to let down my hair, get excited about fiction that includes fiction, that allows freedom of creating a world that does not need to be real.  And maybe it’s not just that these serve as inspiration and validation, but the timing–the space of time and events of here and now and the stories I read within that space–is just right.

This is going to be a rather long excerpt, but it’s about one of my favorite ponderings, that of space of time and place, and I found it rather interesting because it reminds me of the "stop and look around" type of revelations I experience in the dark in my garage.  (Yes, I see the inconsistency here, but in truth, it’s not.)

She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland.  It was the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen.  It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times.  The dead times were best.

She sat and looked at the screen.  It was compelling to her, real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on.  It thrived on the circumstance.  It was three in the morning in Kotka and she waited for a car to come along–not that she wondered who was in it.  It was simply the fact of Kotka.  It was the sense of organization, a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen.  Kotka was another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds.  (p. thirty-eight)

Haven’t you ever wondered what was going on thousands of miles away in the exact moment of your wondering?  Okay, so I wonder what Willie is doing right now.  Where is he, on the bus moving toward a concert?   Is he sleeping or awake?  Damned sure he isn’t wondering what I’m doing this very moment.  But the concept of our own visual and peripheral space and our belief in it for that very reason, somehow by this very fact throws doubt about the existence of that which happens beyond it.  DeLillo’s calling up of the live webcam brings technology into the picture as proof of the space occupied by others beyond our own scope.  Time-stamped even in the corner of the screen.

She imagined that someone might masturbate to this, the appearance of a car on the road to Kotka in the middle of the night.  It made her want to laugh.  She chopped firewood.  She set aside time every day for the webcam at Kotka.  She didn’t know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of floating poetry.  It was best in the dead times.  It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occuring at once, and the numbers changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she sat and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway.  (p. thirty-eight)

Of course we realize that Laura is facing this within the realm of "here one minute, gone the next" in the death of her husband, but DiLillo gives us a simple yet complex viewpoint of our reality that may sound silly to some, but I would argue that who would have believed the earth was round, that you could cram three hundred people into a room of metal and glass and stick on some wings and it would not only suspend you safely  in the sky, but get you to Kotka, Finland. 

"She didn’t know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of floating poetry."  —  Yes, just like flash fiction.

" a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occuring at once,"  —  This brings in the matter of perspective, coming or going; past or future perhaps just as real as the present.  Or, the present being as unreal and without shape as the past and future.

The dead times were best

It was best in the dead times

An excellent foreshadowing of what is to come, since we seem to have acquired a new character in the form of a ghost.  Well, that explains the time thing, no?