The Body Artist

hen novelists who embellish the palpable take a break from social parody they often see ghosts. So it is with the prolific DeLillo. Rey Robles, an aging film director, is dead, a suicide; his younger wife Lauren Hartke, a body artist, dwells in a haze. She’s mesmerized by a web-cam broadcast from a rural town in Finland and announces, “The dead times were the best.” When she finds a boy, a man-child, in her rural New England home, she’s ferried into the clairvoyant. Inner monologue can easily lose its way, but in DeLillo’s carefully elliptical hands Hartke’s condition is a keen meditation on self-involvement and loss.