SENSATION & SENSIBILITY.

The Body Artist
Don DeLillo
Scribner, $22, 128 pp.

Leave it to Don DeLillo to follow up Underworld with a slim novella that conceivably could be used as a bookmark for its hefty, much-acclaimed predecessor. Underworld famously jumped back and forth from the fifties to the nineties, from Ebbets Field to the Bronx to a nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan. The Body Artist, by contrast, is downright claustrophobic, set almost entirely in an aging "old frame house--a place they'd rented unseen--way too big, and there were creaking floorboards and a number of bent utensils dating to god knows."

"They" are Laura Hartke, the titular artist, and Rey Robles, an aging political filmmaker. The Body Artist begins ominously--"It happened this final morning"--but quickly turns into a microscopic study of domestic co-habitation. Rey and Laura eat breakfast, pursue their isolated morning routines, all the while talking right past each other in the clipped, occasionally nonsensical style of Edward Albee or Harold Pinter. But this is DeLillo, after all. So even the most isolated characters will inevitably be linked to the vast outside world of plants and animals, chemicals and technology. With the radio droning on, Laura discovers a hair in her mouth, which is "still twisted from the experience of sharing some food handler's unknown life."

Not until we learn (via an obituary) that "Rey Robles, 64, Cinema's Poet of Lonely Places" has committed suicide, do we get to DeLillo's real focus in The Body Artist--death and loss, and how the living perceive and contend with such suffering. Alternately dense and dazzling, DeLillo can be masterful in this short work, distilling the comic and tragic into a single sentence. But in terms of Laura's loss, DeLillo's prose too often seems cerebral, abstract, or needlessly cryptic. Readers are likely to be drawn into The Body Artist by the allure of DeLillo's heady themes, rather than the symphonic passages that move his grander novels along.

While mourning in a rather frosty manner, Laura discovers a man living in her home. (DeLillo has by now abandoned any pretense of realism, so it's pointless to ask why Laura "felt no fear.") The mystery man--Laura names him Mr. Tuttle, after an old teacher--"gestured as he spoke, moving his hand to the words," and "the gestures [were] unmistakably Rey's." Is The Body Artist a ghost story, with Laura haunted by the memory of her dead husband? That's a start. (Such a resurrection image even suggests a spiritual undercurrent in what does not otherwise seem a particularly religious book.)

But Laura is, first and foremost, an artist--a performer who transforms her body, her language, and her very identity in profound ways. She even keeps a tape recorder handy, to help conjure the wide range of men and women who populate her rage-filled, satirical, ultimately autobiographical one-woman show, fittingly titled "Body Time." Despite all the book's nineteenth-century themes, a twenty-first-century DeLillo emerges in The Body Artist. In an age obsessed with "reality" and unprecedented technology able to recreate "reality," what of the artist? Laura "spends hours at the computer screen looking at live streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland." She also ponders tape recorders, answering machines, newspapers ("a slick hysteria of picture and ink"), radios, mirrors, and even eyeballs, which process matter "upside down before the mind intervenes."

DeLillo has never been merely the chronicler of postwar, postmodern America that many of his fans (and critics) think him to be, althogh it's not hard to see where he got this reputation. There were the duped masses and paranoia of White Noise, the JFK-conspiracy complex of Libra, and the first section of Underworld, named after a four-hundred-fifty-year-old Pieter Brueghel painting. But in The Body Artist, DeLillo is pondering short- and long-term matters--the evolution of human perception, and the artist's ability to reflect reality.

Taken this way, The Body Artist can be seen as an intimate, unsettling update of another short work by a master novelist--Henry James's The Real Thing. Is Mr. Tuttle Laura's ultimate piece of performance art? An amalgam of memory, imagination, and loss, both personal and universal? "What did it mean, the first time a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? The gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls," DeLillo writes in a decidedly anti-Hallmark moment, as Laura ponders Mr. Tuttle.

Most striking is DeLillo's empathy in his rendering of Laura's struggles. At one point, Laura notes with frustration that her ghostly roommate "violates the limits of the human." But it's left unsaid whether or not this is a good thing. Tuttle is shielded, of course, from death and loss. But he also speaks mere gibberish and feels nothing--good or bad. He could never, as Laura does in the end, "thr[ow] the window open to feel the sea tang on her face and the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was."

DeLillo, supposed critic of the dehumanized soul, here seems nearly exuberant. Perhaps it is the very knowledge of our limitations, our ability to perceive pain and loss, which most vigorously affirm our humanity. "Take the risk," DeLillo exhorts the reader, not Laura, in a bold narrative moment. "Believe what you see and hear. It's the pulse of every secret intimation you've ever felt around the edges of your life."

The Body Artist is a provocative, and perhaps transitional work for this ever-innovative novelist. DeLillo's vast cultural themes are present. But they seem secondary to Laura's unique predicament, as well as what Rey at one point calls "the terror of another ordinary day." The Body Artist finally leaves us with a question Brueghel, Henry James, DeLillo, their admirers, and perhaps even the casts of "Survivor" and "Temptation Island" must ponder now and then: "Is reality too powerful for you?"

Tom Deignan has taught American studies, English, and cinema at CUNY and Saint John's University. Currently arts editor for the Irish Voice in New York City, he is at work on a novel called Staten Islanders.