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" With his new novel, indisputably mighty Don DeLillo remains--quietly--The Man. His massive, dense, century-scouring novel Underworld was for many, this reviewer included, the book of the decade. The Body Artist (Scribner, $22), his new work, can be read in a sitting. It is not, however, slight. This time out, DeLillo has chosen to work with the palette of reverie. All is silent, drenched in the failing light of the afternoon. Lauren Hartke is the eponymous character, a performer who makes complex messages with her body. Following the suicide of her filmmaker husband, Rey Robles, she lives in numb isolation in their house on an empty and unnamed stretch of coast, sounding the dimensions of silence and emptiness. &amp;quot;She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. ... It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were best.&amp;quot; DeLillo.  Soon enough, Lauren discovers a stranger in the house, a castaway from reality, a kind of Kaspar Hauser figure--a man miraculously unwarped by the logic and constructs of language. Their encounters in the days and weeks that follow are--how to say it?--Wittgensteinian. The Body Artist ends up being a thinking person&amp;#039;s mystery story. It&amp;#039;s an eerie, but also thrilling, meditation on that strangest of joining points: where clusters of sound come together to make a picture of sense or fail to, suddenly exposing in a strange glare the chaos of what is. Ever unpredictable, ever obsessively intense, DeLillo creates for us a long shiver that eventually discharges itself in a wondering sigh. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a1790/esq0201-feb-mahb-books/>