Damn. I just lost the final wrap-up post on The Body Artist and I’m in no mood to do it all over again from scratch. I pressed "enter" instead of "save".
But since I want to get this monkey off my back, I’ll offer a condensed version:
I didn’t find the odd Mr. Tuttle to be enlightening, warm, or any type of sorrowful time traveler. To me, he was just personalityless and spoke either from what he had memorized or just blurted out (the one big point made in the book was when he says "Don’t touch it. I’ll clean it up later." prior to Lauren’s saying it, but to me, that’s a common enough occurrence to call it coincidence or a case of her repeating back instead of him. Not convincing.)
I found the dialogue of irrelevant and unfinished sentences even between the normal characters to be overdone and annoying.
While I found the ideas of life and death, time and space intriguing, I felt DeLillo’s authorly input would have been better put in essay form.
It bothers me that I found myself taking the resistant and hardheaded realist viewpoint rather than allowing myself suspension of belief in who or what Tuttle was. Even granting him to be a figment of Lauren’s imagination would have been preferable, but I lost my connection to her character midway through the book. In self defense, I easily believed Marquez in whatever he told me happened in 100 Years of Solitude and took it as utter truth.
That’s all, folks.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology