Works of art, great or small, once they are framed, published, played, whatever, achieve an air of timeless inevitability, as if they had sprung fully-formed into the world. But no picture, novel or poem, or piece of music, had to be the way it is. Every artist experiences a sense of vertigo in face of the blank space, sweats in the awful knowledge that there are an infinite number of ways in which to start. And that is only the beginning. Martin Amis has ruefully remarked that every page of literary prose is the result of a couple of thousand errors of judgment.
Don DeLillo's previous novel, Under- world, was, as everybody knows, a gargantuan effort to capture half a century of American history. It was, so to say, a mural the size of the side of a factory, a surprising venture on the part of this great American neo-impressionist. DeLillo is a master of the weighted nuance, of blankeyed insight, of purposeful drift. His masterpiece so far, The Names, closes in a sort of white-out, as his cast of New World expatriates disappear into an immensity of ancient mysteries. In DeLilloland, things happen because they happen, and the chaos of quotidian life is curbed and shaped by dark and covert influences. No matter how arbitrary matters may appear, his novels tell us, there is someone, somewhere, who is secretly in charge, a someone who does not have our best interests at heart. It is not a ghost that is in the machine, but a demon.
The Body Artist is brief, oblique, exquisitely tentative. It is called, with some defiance, a novel, but it is more a prose poem. It opens with a chapter depicting the random morning rituals of a married couple, Rey Robles, a washed-up film director in his 60s, and his much younger wife, Lauren Hartke, the body artist of the book's title. These scenes form a masterly set-piece, in which DeLillo is at his understatedly dramatic best. Here is the opening paragraph:
Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.
In the enclosed world that the book brings into being, Lauren and Rey, "still a little puddled in dream melt", shamble about each other in the kitchen of the big old house, "a relic of the boom years of lumbering and shipbuilding trades, way too big", that they have rented somewhere out in the pine barrens of the New England coast. The morning is quick with glancing sunlight and the flash of bird-wings outside the window. The couple are having breakfast; we smell the coffee, the toast, the fragrance of Rey's accustomed matutinal cigarette. As they assemble themselves to meet the day they might be a pair of pupae breaking sticky-winged out of their cocoons. This is a richly gifted writer of fiction both doing it and at the same time showing how it is done. The writing is at once fully-fleshed and exoskeletal. False starts, authorial uncertainties ("The lever sprang or sprung . . . "), fragments of unfinished phrases, all are allowed to stand. The result, paradoxically, is clarity and high precision. This is Lauren meditating over her bowl of cereal:
The smell of the soya was somewhere between body odor, yes, in the lower extremities and some authentic podlife of the earth, deep and seeded. But that didn't describe it. She read a story in the paper about a child abandoned in some godforsaken. Nothing described it. It was pure smell. It was the thing that smell is, apart from all sources. It was as though and she nearly said something to this effect because it might amuse him but she let it drop - it was as though some, maybe, medieval scholastic had attempted to classify all known odors and had found something that did not fit into his system and had called it soya, which could easily be part of a lofty Latin term, but no it couldn't, and she sat thinking of something, she wasn't sure what, with the spoon an inch from her mouth.
Before we move on from this first, seemingly casual but all-important opening section, we should have a taste of the dialogue, which is, simply, superb.
"Do you have to listen to the radio?"
"No," she said and read the paper. "What?"
"It is such astonishing shit."'
The way he stressed the t in shit, dignifying it.
"I didn't turn on the radio. You turned on the radio," she said.
He went to the fridge and came back with a large dark fig and turned off the radio.
"Give me some of that," she said, reading the paper.
"I was not blaming. Who turned it on, who turned it off. Someone's a little edgy this morning. I'm the one, what do I say, who should be defensive. Not the young woman who eats and sleeps and lives forever."
That last, apparently playful throwaway about Lauren's youth and life expectancy takes on a tragic hue when Rey finishes his cigarette and drives off to the city, and we turn the page to find ourselves confronted with his newspaper obituary, informing us that he "was found dead Sunday morning in the Manhattan apartment of his first wife, the fashion designer Isabel Corrales". An intricate life-story is sketched out for Rey Robles. Born Alejandro Alquezar, in Barcelona, he grew up an orphan in the Soviet Union, lived in Paris, where he worked inter alia as a street juggler and a bit-part actor, moved to Los Angeles, found a rich patron and became a briefly successful movie director, telling an appreciative Cannes audience, "The answer to life is the movies". This is the stuff of a couple of hundred pages of a Libra or an Underworld. Did DeLillo in The Body Artist start out with the intention of writing another big book, only to get diverted somehow, perhaps by running into compositional trouble? Is The Body Artist an "abandoned work", like Beckett's famous fragment of that name? We shall not know, and it hardly matters.
Widowed, Lauren returns to the house in the barrens to try to remake her life. She is alone, or so she thinks, and she may be a little mad. "Everything is slow and hazy and drained and it all happens around the word seem." As she practises her exercises, stretching and bending her body to its limits, she hears again the unexplained sounds that she and Rey had been hearing since they first came to the house. At last she discovers that there is an interloper living in one of the bedrooms. "He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe." She assumes this secret sharer, whom she names Mr Tuttle after a schoolteacher she once had, is a runaway from a mental institution, but instead of calling the police she begins to care for him. Her efforts at communication prove fruitless; her questions he answers with such formulations as "It is not able" and "I said this what I said". In Mr Tuttle too we watch a creature, a person, a world, struggling to come to some sort of life. He has an uncanny power to reproduce things Rey had said in the house, speaking in Rey's voice. Is he there at all, or only a figment of Lauren's imagination? Is he the ghost of Rey, trying to speak to her from the beyond?
Eventually Mr Tuttle disappears, as mysteriously as he arrived. Lauren begins to work in earnest on her body, bleaching her hair, scrubbing at her skin with pumice stones, starving herself, all in preparation for a work of performance art, "Body Time", in which she turns herself into a gallery of disparate "characters". The piece, another newspaper account tells us, begins with Lauren as an ancient Japanese woman, and ends "with a naked man, emaciated and aphasic, trying desperately to tell us something".
So is all this, Lauren's story and DeLillo's book, what it has all been about, the forging of a work of art? That, yes, and more; but mostly that. Art, The Body Artist tells us, is made out of life, but in it life is transformed, transfigured, made myriad. Woman becomes widow becomes Japanese crone becomes naked man becomes woman again. In the closing lines of the book she is back in the rented house:
She walked into the room and went to the window. She opened it. She threw the window open. She didn't know why she did this. Then she knew. She wanted to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times