Grief comes home

If you run with the big dogs, eventually you will find yourself in a restaurant where, shortly after ordering something you can only vaguely visualize, a waitperson will glide by and place before you an ...item. A small bite of ...something. It will have a curled slice of cucumber, perhaps, or a tiny leaf.

"From the chef, to whet your palate," the waitperson will say, placing the comma precisely, before gliding away.

If you are honest with yourself, what you will feel next is stupid. What is ...this? Do you cut it? Do you spear it? Do you eat it in one bite or two? Do you chew?

Can you avoid eating it at all, or does that make you a coward?

"The Body Artist" is a something from chef Don DeLillo, and you may be forgiven for seeing this lagniappe as a perplexing sort of gift.

This 12th of DeLillo's novels is very little like the feast that was the 832-page "Underworld" and even more nouvelle cuisine than "Libra" or "White Noise," which earned DeLillo his reputation for tossing the tart, the bitter and the salty together in unexpected but pungent combinations. "The Body Artist" is small. It is odd. There is no comedy, black or otherwise, and just a sprinkle of parody. You will be halfway through it and you will wonder how to describe the defeated taste in your mouth.

That taste in your mouth. "The Body Artist" begins at a meal, a breakfast, on a "strong bright day after a storm." A husband drinks coffee and reads the newspaper. A wife rinses blueberries in the tap, eyes closed to "breathe the savor rising." She makes toast, he gets up for the juice, sometimes they bump into each other, sometimes they twist out of the way. They talk in ellipses and compressions. DeLillo rummages through the half-thoughts of the wife and then turns to the bland insights of a narrator.

Then the husband, Rey, kills himself. (I spoil nothing here; it's on page 27.) He is survived by the wife, Lauren, who is a body artist, whatever that is. Aha, you think, so this is a book about grief, and brace yourself, knowing that grief is difficult to write about and therefore very difficult to read about. Will this book be defeated by sticky banality? Or more simply by the vastness between Lauren's devastation and our tiny words? Will DeLillo go where most novelists have to, hinting at the vastness and devastation by the tragic-comic-incomprehensible actions of the heroine?

He goes elsewhere, and this is why "The Body Artist" is both very interesting and yet very unlikely to interest most readers. Yes, we see Lauren doing comic-incomprehensible things, spending hours watching a Web page of an empty road in Finland. She does banal-comprehensible things, cleaning and chopping firewood and talking to friends who think she should get out more. She does exercises, stretching and panting and others that actors or performance artists would invent. She lives on a whistling plain of loneliness that is harsh even by DeLillo standards.

Then she finds a man on the third floor of the house. On the third floor, sitting on a bed in his underwear. He is small and pale and he speaks like a lobotomized version of her dead husband, echoing his very voice and his familiar gestures and even words he had once said.

"This was not some communication with the dead. It was Rey alive in the course of a talk he'd had with her, in this room, not long after they'd come here. She was sure of this, recalling how they'd gone upstairs and dropped into a night of tossing sensation, drifts of sex, confession and pale sleep, and it was confession as belief in each other, not unburdenings of guilt but avowals of belief, mostly his and stricken by need, and then drowsy sex again, two people passing through each other, easy and airy as sea spray, and how he'd told her that she was helping him recover his soul."

Lauren does not throw the man out. She befriends him, tape-records his robotic-Rey voice, tries to understand what he might be.

Which is what you, patient you, rabid fan you, are wondering, too. Yes, the man might be -- probably is -- a hallucination, and DeLillo is insisting on his reality to highlight the sheer stubborn solidity of grief. OK. Or, he might be "real," which is creepy but does offer a little frisson of delight at the nerve of the novelist.

Or the strange man might be a way to make grief a living thing, someone idiosyncratic and specific who can be named and wrestled and thrown out of the plot.

I like that possibility best, particularly when Lauren begins to seek a way out of her grief and the solution she hits upon scrubs at the line between herself and the strange man.

But the appetite for minimalist experiments and "magic realism" is always small. Conservative readers can enjoy "The Body Artist" for the beauty of DeLillo's sentences and his offhand mastery:

"She stopped listening to weather reports. She took the weather as it came, chill rain and blowy days, the great hunched boulders in the slant fields, like clan emblems, pulsing with stormlight and story and time." "The slant fields" could come from very few writers; the whole only from DeLillo.

"The Body Artist" may go untouched by all but the most adventurous. But they will be rewarded with a sense of what the master creates, when he isn't bound by the usual tastes.

Marta Salij has been the books writer for the Detroit Free Press for two years. She joined the Free Press in 1997 to launch and edit the newspaper's real estate sections. Before that, she had been a reporter and editor at newspapers in Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee. She lives in Ferndale, Michigan, with her husband and son.