Don DeLillo, "The Body Artist"
Some people have a hook to their writing. Vonnegut has his �So it goes� whenever somebody dies. Hunter Thompson more than occasionally stops to ask, �How long, O Lord, how long?� Almost every Stephen King book has a line at the end of one chapter that reads, �And that was the last time they saw him/her alive.�
DeLillo�s hook seems to be having people talk like they�re more likely to if this were real life. Real life conversations don�t always advance the action or further the story line. People go on tangents, they interrupt and they talk about things that may not make a whole lot of sense, or even have a point.
And I�m okay with that. It was one of the things that made White Noise so great. But I�m noticing that with several of his books that there doesn�t seem to be a point at all. I�m okay with that as well. There doesn�t have to be resolution when you reach the final page. look at the end of �The Grapes of Wrath,� my favorite book of all time.
Still though, after reading four books with no central theme or point, you start to get a little sick of the �slice of life� style of writing.
Though I�m not totally sick of it yet. This was more tolerable than some of the other books by him, probably because it was really short. Consider �Underworld,� which had 827 pages featuring 7,000 characters, none of which interconnect or reach any kind of resolution. Yeesh. Sometimes it felt like he was just laying down these incredibly detailed descriptions and emotions for no reason except to show how clever he was. What transpired was a huge book with several extremely well written scenes that had nothing to do with each other � a collection of short stories in book form.
�The Body Artist� was the same way. In fact, you could have placed this anywhere in Underworld and it wouldn�t have screwed up the story line, such as it was. As it is, I think it�s better when it stands alone. DeLillo�s interesting to read, but he continues to have these books that I think are a nice effort but fail in the larger scheme of things. And yet I keep on reading him. So do a lot of other people.
By that reasoning, why would he change his style?
