The Body Artist was published by Scribner in February 2001 — seven months before the September 11th attacks would transform the American literary landscape. It is DeLillo’s shortest novel (barely 120 pages) and his most formally radical: a meditation on grief, time, and embodiment that strips narrative to its barest elements and asks whether consciousness can survive the loss of the person who confirmed its reality.
The Novel
Lauren Hartke is a body artist — a performance artist who works with her own physical form. Her husband Rey Robles, an aging film director, has killed himself. Lauren remains alone in the rented coastal house where they spent their final weeks together, and there she discovers Mr. Tuttle — a strange figure, possibly autistic, possibly not entirely real, who seems to exist in a different relationship to time than ordinary humans. He repeats fragments of past conversations, speaks in displaced tenses, and may be a manifestation of Lauren’s grief or may be something else entirely.
The novel’s first chapter — a minutely observed breakfast scene between Lauren and Rey on the morning of his suicide — is one of the most extraordinary pieces of prose DeLillo has written. Every detail of coffee-making, newspaper-reading, and casual conversation acquires terrible weight from the reader’s knowledge (withheld at first, then revealed) of what is about to happen.
Time and Language
The Body Artist is fundamentally about time — about how grief disorders temporal experience, making the past feel present and the present feel impossibly distant. Mr. Tuttle embodies this temporal confusion: he exists simultaneously in multiple time-frames, repeating sentences that haven’t been spoken yet, accessing conversations from the past as if they were happening now.
DeLillo’s prose enacts this temporal disturbance through sentence structures that resist linear parsing. Tenses shift within paragraphs. Cause and effect are separated. The language itself becomes a body experiencing trauma — present but not entirely functional, processing but not entirely coherent.
The Body as Subject
Lauren’s art — body art, performance art — provides the novel’s philosophical framework. If the self is constituted through the body, and the body is something that can be consciously shaped, then what happens to the self when the other body (the beloved’s body, the confirming presence) disappears? Lauren’s final performance, described in the novel’s closing pages, attempts to answer this question by transforming her own body into a record of loss.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Scribner, New York, in February 2001. First printings are identified by:
- Scribner imprint on title page
- “First Scribner hardcover edition” stated
- Number line including “1”
- Slim format, cloth binding with dust jacket
The novel received respectful but somewhat bewildered reviews. Critics accustomed to DeLillo’s capacious social novels were uncertain what to make of this compressed, private, formally extreme work.
Collecting The Body Artist
First edition (Scribner, 2001): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $30–$75. The slim volume had a reasonable first printing.
Signed copies bring $100–$250.
The Body Artist is a specialist’s DeLillo — the novel that devotees often rank highest and casual readers find most difficult. Its collecting profile is modest but stable among DeLillo completists.