This is the second DeLillo book I've read, so I knew to expect an odd book. I'm not really into dissecting novels for hidden meanings and symbolism, so I am sure I missed things. That said, I didn't really enjoy this book. It was short, and the idea of a 'body artist' was interesting. As a book about dealing with the death of a loved one this was a decent read, too. I was amused by the ways the protagonist combines elements of her life, including the people she sees around her, into her performance. It almost turned her own life into just another layer of her performance art, rather than a 'real' life. I could see how this book could make for good class discussions in a literature class, but I would not have included it in a 1001 Books list. ( )

2.5 - A bloated short. Far from Delillo's best. ( )

2.5 - A bloated short. Far from Delillo's best. ( )

A short and very odd book that manages to be about how explicit abstract thought can be. Most of the enjoyment of this book happens after one reads it. There is a delightful lack of many of the checkboxes in standard fiction: the protagonist has little backstory, nor does the relationship itself (Lauren, a body artist, is left alone after the death of her husband), there isn’t a plot, per se, and the reader is not invited to care about the characters. Instead, we are drawn into a spectral study on what it means to remain behind. Lauren uses (to our mind) random sights and sounds for her performance piece; don’t we all? Whether she is imagining and then reimagining snippets of conversations with her late husband or there is a physical ghost in the house is irrelevant — just as any of the sparse facts we are told about either Lauren or her husband seem (?) to be irrelevant. It is in the prose, in the descriptions and observations, even more so in the strange way the reader is left with a dual reaction of “no, this is meaningless / yes, this is how life is” that the book succeeds.

It reminded me of David Lowery’s film “A Ghost Story” in that the beginning was making me fidget and wonder where the story was going and even into the middle I suspected I wasn’t going to last; then it became beautiful. I didn’t underline a single sentence, despite all the praise for the book’s prose, and couldn’t repeat any of them to you. But they are weirdly there, in my brain, in the same chopped and collaged way many are written. I didn’t enjoy reading the book; I enjoyed having read it. ( )

The real meaning(s) of this book went past me, I think, but I enjoyed the writing a lot. Usually I read pretty quickly and not very thoroughly. But the language in this story made me want to read very slowly and I actually read a lot of the book word by word, almost as if I was reading it out loud. ( )