The Body Artist
by Don DeLillo
(New York: Scribner, 2000)

In their highly distinctive ways, J.G. Ballard and Don DeLillo have been the apocalyptic scribes of the 20th Century. For all the 2001 hoopla surrounding Arthur C Clarke in the year 2001, it is the Englishman Ballard and the American DeLillo who have, like latter day Nostradmi, played grim futurists for the new century.

Both are steeped in recent history; DeLillo is plagued by the Cold War, Ballard is informed by the Second World War; both are irradiated by nuclear armageddon as a symbolic gesture, a cornerstone of contemporary psychological uncertainty.
Catastrophe looms in every chapter for both authors.

After DeLillo's immense and brilliant opus of the last century, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), it was impossible to imagine what he could produce to eclipse his own brilliance. Perhaps sadly, he didn't even try.

DeLillo is the ultimate American archeologist, sifting through cultural trends, from football to rock 'n' roll, politics to physics, searching for the hidden histories of Americana.

In his eleven books preceding this one he has taken a scalpel to America's hidden underbelly, slicing gently away to reveal its secrets. Underworld, literally bursting with the obscure textures that make up the contemporary American psyche; from baseball to Vietnam, from Lenny Bruce to J. Edgar Hoover, DeLillo revealed a secret history of the United States. While Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer bickered like children in a sand pit over the fate of the great American novel, DeLillo quietly created it.

In The Body Artist, it would seem that DeLillo has taken time out to produce a whimsical, albeit barren, ode to loneliness. DeLillo has often seemed like a frustrated art critic, his books, whether centered around football or science, find regular asides to comment on contemporary art.

The central figure of The Body Artist, Laura Hartke, is, not surprisingly, a performance artist. Her husband commits suicide at the novel's beginning, leading to a dream-like time of introspection for the artist, which is interupted by the mysterious appearance of a young man.

The Body Artist is a meditation on language and communication, both verbal and physical. It delves into the realm of despair, the desperation to articulate loss and desire and the inherent loneliness at the core of each and every individual. DeLillo's novels are rarely uplifting, however The Body Artist seems to dwell on a melancholy that is never wholly convincing and which borders on the indulgent. However, as with anything born from DeLillo's pen, The Body Artist is infused with a magical lyricism.

Ballard, on the other hand, is in top form with Super-Cannes. All too often described as a writer of science fiction, Ballard's unique brand of psych-fiction has consistently explored the realms of delusion and Surrealism. With Super-Cannes, Ballard returns to a bleak and frightening scenario first explored in his classic novel High Rise (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975).

The denizens of a high tech industrial park, Eden-Olympia, near Cannes, have created the ultimate high-efficiency working environment. However it is an environment that leads to chronic over work, and the gradual decomposition of social and personal life. The solution, it would appear, is a new form of psychotherapy: a controlled form of deliberately induced psychosis.

Ballard's genius is in his ability to draw the reader into the terrifying delusions of his characters. With his most recent novels, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1996) and Super-Cannes, Ballard has opted for a form akin to the English murder mystery; however forget the niceties of Agatha Christie. Ballard's latest is infused with drug abuse, sadistic bashings and murders described with forensic clarity. More troubling still is his investigation of the psychology of his characters, and the gradual changes we witness in his main character, the originally sane and calm Paul Sinclair.

Inevitably many of Ballard's own obsessions feature here. Throughout his 27 books we revisit his visions of empty swimming pools, damaged planes and erotically charged automobiles. From his more 'mainstream' autobiographical Empire of the Sun (London: Gollancz, 1984) to the controversial Crash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), Ballard's vision has remained unwavering.