The Body Artist is a novella written in 2001 by Don DeLillo. It explores the highly abnormal grieving process of a young performance artist following the sudden death of her significantly older husband. Freud's theory of melancholia appears to be a major inspiring principle underlying the work. It is sometimes described as a ghost story due to the appearance of an enigmatic spectre named Mr. Tuttle, whom Lauren finds hiding in an upstairs room of the house following her bereavement.
Plot summary
Lauren Hartke and her film director husband, Rey Robles, are occupying an isolated house outside New York City. They have a sparse verbal exchange over breakfast before Rey leaves for work. Later that morning, Rey is found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his first wife's Manhattan apartment. An obituary detailing the frequently ambiguous details of Rey's life ensues, where Rey's age (64) is revealed, along with his history of depression and the fact that Lauren had been Rey's third wife. A bereaved Lauren remains alone in the house against the advice of her friends and relatives. She becomes strangely disconnected from the temporal world and from her own body, experiencing frequent and inexplicable deja vu. Lauren spends the subsequent hours, days and weeks trying to reconnect her mind with her body. To this end, she practices her trademark 'bodywork'-- aerobic and stretching techniques she has developed to prepare her body for performance pieces. Lauren also integrates a sequence of daily rituals, including chopping firewood and gazing for hours at webcam footage of a road in Kotka, Finland. One morning, Lauren hears a noise coming from the upper floor of the house. She goes upstairs to investigate but finds no one there. Lauren goes upstairs again the next day. This time, she finds a man sitting in one of the bedrooms. The man's appearance varies each time Lauren sees him, but in this first incarnation, he is described as "smallish and fine-boned [resembling] a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep" (43).
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