1. I'm not done with The Body Artist. But I will be tonight. I'm finding I have to read this book alone and in utter silence because it haunts me as I read it. This haunting is so fine and lovely that it's banished by any interruption. Although other books have dragged me in so deeply that they've proven to be interruption-proof, I'm thinking that what the The Body Artist is doing to me is in some ways even more viscerally affective. It's the best kind of haunting, maybe, because it's made me so concerned about maintaining its spell. It makes me want to wreath the reading-of-it in ritual.
2. Is this what great haunting does? Make you actively (not passively) ensure that the haunting keeps happening? In a way, that's what's happening to the characters-- (SEMI-SPOILER)-- Lauren, the body artist, is entranced and disturbed by how her dead husband manifests through a stranger. She can't stop herself-- she actively attempts to invoke it.
3. A beautifully close third person, here. Lauren has a thought, interrupts it mid-sentence with another thought, completes Thought Number 2, and then returns to Thought Number 1. Also with Action Number 1 and Action Number 2. Like a ghost, she can't do anything all the way, in-and-of-itself; she floats through this, she floats through that.
4. Why is White Noise the only other DeLillo I've ever read? This book is fantastic.
Which DeLillo book has a main character named Eric Packer? I listened to a terrific audiobook reading of that one. Same guy read it as Denis Johnson's Nobody Move. Now that is another great book.
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna give this is a try, I think. You should check out Cosmopolis. It's brief, but wonderful. I consider it the soul-sister of White Noise.
ReplyDeleteLoving these write-ups...
Thanks for the recs, guys. It's been a while since I've read Johnson, and I'm definitely feeling the DeLillo-- his work reads so FAST.
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