Our bodies are not our own. Our bodies are strange creatures over whom we pretend to have dominion - but in reality it is we who are shackled to them.
Memory is a ghost that haunts your attic, your bedroom. Memory is hollow, speechless, useless and compelling. Memory does not speak our language, it just mimics our syntax.
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo is a ghost story, but it is not particuarly interested in the supernatural. The novel follows Lauren Hartke, a body artist living in a rented house on the deserted New England coastline. One day her husband goes for a drive - all the way to New York and the apartment of an ex-wife where he swallows a shotgun and pulls the trigger.
Unlike DeLillo's other work such as White Noise, this novel doesn't satirise pop culture or modern politics. Normally his scope is quite vast - he writes "American" novels that capture the paranoid zeitgeist of the age of information overload. But here, his spare pointed prose is directed much more personally.
We fall in and out of Lauren's consciousness as she tries to deal with her grief...
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