Don DeLillo's 'Body Art' Explores Disappearance in 125 Pages

In his 2001 novel 'Body Art,' Don DeLillo subverts his own reputation for lengthy novels with a brief 125-page text that experiments with what he calls the 'process of disappearance.' The story follows Lauren, a 36-year-old performance artist who retreats to a secondary residence after the suicide of her older Spanish filmmaker husband. There she encounters a strange being, 'the extraterrestrial,' capable of imitating her deceased husband's voice and delivering fragmented, enigmatic dialogues from their past. This encounter transforms Lauren's life and art: she learns to speak like the being using a tape recorder, opens herself to metamorphosis, and ultimately creates a performance that plays with bodily states different from her own. DeLillo's narrative structure mirrors this dissolution, with chapters that impose their own temporality and refuse hierarchy—the first chapter stretches a breakfast scene into minute detail, while the second presents a newspaper article about the director's suicide. The novel thus appears as the trace of a dissolved summa, with non-concordant dialogues between Lauren and the creature creating gaps and holes in the narrative. DeLillo, who has chosen to no longer intervene publicly, uses this brevity to counteract the efficiency and speed demands of American culture. The work was reviewed by Laurent Goumarre in artpress.