After 11 novels, DeLillo (Underworld;
White Noise) is an acknowledged American master, and a writer who
rarely repeats his successes. This slim novella is puzzling, and may
prove entirely mystifying to many readers; like all DeLillo's fiction,
it offers a vision of contemporary life that expresses itself most
clearly in how the story is told. Would you recognize what you had said
weeks earlier, if it were the last thing, among other last things, you
said to someone you loved and would never see again? That question,
posed late in the narrative, helps explain the somewhat aimless and
seemingly pointless opening scene, in which a couple gets up, has
breakfast, and the man looks for his keys. Next we learn that heDfailed
film director Rey Robles, 64Dis dead of a self-inflicted gunshot
wound. SheDLauren, a "body artist"Dgoes on living alone in their house
along a lonely coast, until she tracks a noise to an unused room on the
third floor and to a tiny, misshapen man who repeats back
conversations that she and Rey had weeks before. Is Mr. Tuttle, as
Lauren calls him, real, possibly an inmate wandered off from a local
institution? Or is he a figment of Lauren's grieving imagination? Is
thisDas DeLillo playfully slips into Lauren's mind at one pointDthe
first case of a human abducting an alien? One way of reading this story
is as a novel told backwards, in a kind of time loop: DeLillo keeps
hidden until his closing pages Lauren's role as a body artistDand with
it, the novel's true narrative intent. DeLillo is always an offbeat and
challenging novelist, and this little masterpiece of the storyteller's
craft may not be everyone's masterpiece of the storytelling art. But
like all DeLillo's strange and unforgettable works, this is one every
reader will have to decide on individually. (Feb. 6)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
