The Present Tense

Writers should be more dangerous, Don DeLillo once said. They should stand outside society and work in opposition, against power, against the state, against the whole apparatus of assimilation. His own novels arrive to us like underground reports in dangerous times: the language smuggled, the tone bristling, tense. He seems to hoard evidence of the interconnectedness of things as mounting proof of some eerily vast conspiracy. He called his first novel “Americana,” as only a writer prepared to mount a revolt could do. His novels shine a haunting sodium-vapor light on contemporary America. At times, he has even seemed prophetic.

Yet his greatest achievement may not be his proximity to the future but the way he has taken the dull constraints of history and exploded them in the crucible of language. “Libra” is as convincing a theory of the assassination of JFK as anyone has offered, made more believable still by the power of great sentences and history rewritten in breath and blood. “Mao II” opens with a mass wedding of the Moonies in Yankee Stadium, which DeLillo uses as a counterpoint to the life of an arch-individualist, the reclusive writer Bill Gray. DeLillo’s “Underworld” is an epic vision of Cold War America inspired by two historic blasts, a famous home run and an atomic test. “Underworld” is beautiful, a masterpiece. Its flaws seem necessary errors, casualties of the work’s greatness. DeLillo is a risk-taking writer, which is one reason why he is also a great one.

And DeLillo’s new novel, “The Body Artist,” is nothing if not risky. Most obvious, it’s a gamble plot-wise, largely confined to the relentless consciousness of a woman after the suicide of her husband. Her attention is focused mostly on an apparently retarded man she finds in an upstairs room of the large house she rented with her husband. Who this man is and where he comes from and how long he has been in the house, she never finds out. “There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinness of physical address.” So elusive, really, that one wonders whether he actually exists or if he is only a bizarre ghost, the impacted memory of her husband, Rey, or even the demented embodiment of her grief.

But the man appears to be real. He dribbles his food and soils in his pants. The woman, Lauren Hartke, names him Mr. Tuttle, after a “semi-bumbling” high school science teacher. He barely speaks, and when he does it’s in a mangled, incomprehensible grammar, although sometimes, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, he repeats verbatim household conversations that took place between Lauren and Rey. He can even reproduce the timbre of their voices. Lauren lives with Mr. Tuttle in the deep solitude of the house, following him around with a tape recorder, until one day he disappears as inexplicably as he came. Ultimately Lauren, who works as a body artist, contorting and transforming herself for an audience, begins to make herself over in the image of this baffling creature, bleaching her skin, cutting her hair and finally using his voice. That’s the basic run of the narrative. A series of unusual choices perhaps, but there it is.

But possibly the most radical risk DeLillo takes with “The Body Artist” is his departure from so many things that he is, well, good at. Incidental things to begin with, like the exhilarating collection of information, facts and evidence, which is the industry of suspicion and the foundation of any skilled opposition. Only 124 pages, “The Body Artist” is spare, emptied of all that is not self-referential. But rather than serving as a liberation, this stripping-down makes the writing feel drained and airless. Lauren’s thoughts repeat or double back on themselves. Everything is still connected, but only internally, and so we never get that sudden feeling of the ground dropping away and the whole breathtaking picture coming into view that we sometimes do with DeLillo--the vista that makes all the obsessive tracking of connections worthwhile.

The starkest absence of the familiar DeLillo, however, is that of the writer working on the edge who sends us back thrilling images of history--the one just past or the one we are now living--that at once disturb and affirm us. “The Body Artist” is an introverted, almost ingrown book, insistently devoid of all but the present. Although Lauren is mourning her husband, there are no real reminiscences of their life together. Tuttle repeats mostly passing fragments of their conversations. What moves her about him is that he seems to exist oblivious of time: “His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous somehow, with the present.” Ditto with the past. The book hammers and pelts us with the narrow banality of the present, as if this sort of meditation will eventually release us into an enlightened state of pure being in the moment.

*

The writer who once quoted from John Cheever’s journals that the task of an American writer is to describe 400 people under the lights reaching for a foul ball and not the misgivings of some woman as she looks out the window at the rain has given us exactly that: a woman looking out the window at a hell of a lot of rain. DeLillo has never cared much about rousing compassion for his characters, instead courting detachment, so a book by him that is almost entirely confined to the inner life of one character, especially as an excuse for philosophical musing about time and perception, is a surprize. The book is also strikingly void of DeLillo’s sinister humor, his acute sense for the absurdities of life in late-20th century America.

What we are left with, what is most recognizably DeLillo, is the sound of the sentences. A good writer’s style is unmistakable; it is the concentrated result of his intimate and native relationship to the language. This is especially true of DeLillo, not only because his writing is so stylized but also because it is so obviously language, not plot, that drives his writing: “The basic work is built around the sentence,” he once said. DeLillo’s great sentences are still present in “The Body Artist”: the loose and sliding phrasing, the lyrical victories, his approximation of the improvised rhythms of thought. But these are the same things that, in the wrong combinations, sometimes make his sentences downright awkward. It could be argued that it has been DeLillo’s rootedness in reality, in the grain of history and culture, which has allowed him to take off linguistically. When all that is left is the language, when DeLillo’s sentences are freed from the bracing rigor of fact, his words tend to collapse under their own weight.

The worst sentences in “The Body Artist”--and paradoxically the most important, those that are a sort of Morse code for the novel’s philosophic message--are spoken by Mr. Tuttle. Lauren once refers to him as a fool, but his language has none of the coded profundity of a true fool, like Lear’s, whose riddles can be cracked for wisdom. “Coming and going I am leaving. I will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where,” Tuttle rambles. When he peels off this one-liner--”The word for moonlight is moonlight”--Lauren thinks, “It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true--or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be.” And herein lies the most significant problem with “The Body Artist,” for struggle as one might to understand and sympathize with the philosophical depth Lauren finds in Mr. Tuttle’s being, the revelations he inspires in her ultimately seem forced and shallow. As a whole, “The Body Artist,” like Tuttle’s language, promises to be full of meaning but turns out to be stubbornly impenetrable.

“The Body Artist” is, at times, a beautiful portrayal of the feel of solitude, of the mind desperately trying to steady itself in its grief, of how we make, from the raw tonnage of our perceptions, art. But these successes do not relieve the larger frustration of the book’s abstruse and scrabbled philosophic meaning. When we are told that Lauren majored in philosophy before dropping out of college, it feels like an excuse for all the loftiness, and one thinks, and hates to think, that surely she dropped out because she turned out to be a poor philosopher.

DeLillo has never cared much for pandering to the crowds he writes so well about. For years his novels hardly sold and were read only by a small, if enthusiastic, following. One must respect a writer who refuses to keep repeating the same strategies that finally won him his breathless audience, who instead lights out for new territory. But one can’t help but wish that if a writer is going to be dangerous, the threat should come in the powerful clarity of his communication and not its dogged fogginess.