Book Reviews

THE BODY ARTIST

by Don Delillo

Don Delillo has a better handle on the whole existence thing than the rest of us. He writes about America: our orange juice billboards, our cults, our Kennedy assassination and our household chemicals ... a lot about our household chemicals. The color gray is big in Don Delillo's writing; it's the last name of his writer character in Mao II, it's the color you get when you mix up black and white in Underworld, and fog is gray. So is cigarette smoke. In Delillo's new novel, the great film director Rey Robles smokes his cigarette at the breakfast table with his third wife Lauren Hartke, the titular body artist, in a big old house on the coast where the fog and haze rolls in.

This is before Robles leaves for New York to shoot himself dead in the apartment of his first wife Isabel Corrales. "And I know exactly how his mind was working," Corrales says afterward to Hartke. "He said to himself two things. This is a woman I know forever. And maybe she will not mind the mess." Delillo also writes about self-indulgent artists.

So Robles is dead high over Manhattan. As a director, he would know that this is a "Big Event," a catalyst that sets the plot in motion. As a great American novelist who lists Fellini, Hawks and Godard as greater influences than Pound or Fitzgerald, Delillo would also know that the protagonist will have challenges to face before the credits roll.

The challenges are words like 'afterward' and 'before'. They take shape in the awkward, haunted man Hartke finds in a third floor bedroom of the old house on the coast.

Having spent several days scrubbing bathroom fixtures and huffing the Pine Sol fumes sprayed from a bottle with a pistol-grip, the body artist meets Mr. Tuttle. Hartke gives the visitor this moniker because he reminds her of a high school science teacher who "spoke in unmeasured hesitations that made the students feel embarrassed on his behalf, the few sensitive ones, or openly restless, the restless, which was everybody else."

It is fitting that Hartke name this faltering man, because when he appears and says things like, "I know how much this house," and, "It is not able," they are always about Hartke. Mr. Tuttle will speak like Hartke, and repeat entire conversations she had with her deceased husband in impeccable Hartke and Robles. Blurting fragments of Hartke's past, present and future, Mr. Tuttle is what happens when Rainman goes cruising in Doc Brown's DeLorean. "I'm an excellent driver."

The writing of Don Delillo strikes a resonant minor chord in a society bombarded with saccharine ditties and jingles selling toothpaste and war. It is prose that conjures the ambiguous, the absurd and the sublime. Try Delillo today, in the 124- page, handy, sample-size The Body Artist.

If you are satisfied, other volumes will follow; like White Noise, Underworld, and Libra.
A --Andrew Wells

CHERRY: A MEMOIR

by Mary Karr

If you were to write your own life story, what would you say about yourself? Could you add up the pieces of your existence (your pimply high school boyfriends, the summer vacations spent in an inflatable backyard pool, your part-time jobs at various fast-food feed-holes, the endless days of school) and create a story that anyone (except maybe your mom) would want to read? Do you have to lead an extraordinary life to have anything interesting to say about it?

With her memoir Cherry, Mary Karr answers the question of just what it takes to tell an interesting story when you've basically spent all your time in one place, never been anywhere, and never seen anything.

Growing up in the bleak, small town of Leechfield, Texas, in the early '70s, Mary hasn't done a whole lot except for ride her bike around the block and take trips to the beach. She is an unremarkable girl with so-so grades, borderline alcoholic parents, and a beautiful, goddess-like sister. As her sister Lecia parades around the neighborhood in short-shorts and halter-tops, a junior- high-aged Mary decides she doesn't want to be left out of the action. So she forms a "Sex Club." The main purpose of this club is to get boys in her daddy's dark garage and kiss them. Hey, if you're living in a small town, you gotta do what you can to entertain yourself.

As Mary gets older, her desires to overcome her mind-numbing environment of football worshipping classmates, punishing teachers, and local Leechfield "bone-heads" leads her into a world of obsessive poetry reading and drug abuse. While delving into T. S. Eliot, Mary also begins taking pills. Leechfield, despite a lack of real entertainment or culture, is bursting at the seems with hallucinogenic drugs, and Mary soon finds herself cramming as many chemicals into her bloodstream as she can stand. This previously quiet "good girl" ends up in jail, narrowly escaping death (and worse) in rundown bars, and guzzling Gallo as her friends pass out on the floor.

Yet through the tedium of the endless hangovers and early-morning shakes, Mary holds on to the one thing she truly loves-- poetry. As her teachers discourage her talent for writing, Mary can do nothing but record every little knock she takes with a poet's wisdom and accuracy.

Cherry is about taking whatever happens to you (even if it's just a hard-core puke in a public bathroom) and seeing it as a life-changing event. For Mary, every little detail has meaning. Her memoir proves that when you look at your life (even a life of tractor-pulls and bad barbecue) with a poet's eyes, everything is important and everything is beautiful. A --Cecilia Johnson