THE BODY ARTIST
by Don DeLillo
(Scribner) $22

If White Noise was Don DeLillo’s perfected paean to pop culture, and Underworld his perfected Ulysses, then DeLillo’s newest, The Body Artist, is his perfected prose poem. Slim, tumbling with euphony, The Body Artist holds metaphor up to the reader’s eye like a stereoscope, and as always, the world pops into three-dimensional relief through DeLillo’s textured prose.

Main character Lauren Hartke is the body artist, married to the failed but famous filmmaker Rey Robles. The first chapter streams through one morning in the couple’s rented country home: birds alight in the window feeder; Lauren keeps missing the weather on the radio; conversation circumnavigates something that’s wrong in the house. DeLillo spins this stream-of-consciousness scene with the confidence of formal poetry, picking each word precisely, and knowing just when to end.

Then the book fractures. A death, and a mysterious appearance, turn Lauren inward. Her instinct is for transformation, so she employs her art, physically becoming an amalgam of people she has intimately known or only briefly glanced upon. DeLillo renders Lauren’s evolution through the eyes of a new narrator, a journalist, increasing its shock value.

One complaint about DeLillo is that the density of his prose places the reader too far from the characters and narrative. In The Body Artist, however, DeLillo fashions a plot that allows him to spatter prose onto his characters as canvases, purely and perfectly. TRACI VOGEL

TRULY WILDE: THE UNSETTLING STORY OF DOLLY WILDE, OSCAR’S UNUSUAL NIECE
by Joan Schenkar
(Basic Books) $30

If there is a worse fate than to languish in the shadow of a talented relative, it is to have a shoddy biography written about it. That is the unfortunate fate of Dolly Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s niece, in Joan Schenkar’s incompetent book Truly Wilde. Beginning with the unwieldy title, the reader is tipped off to the white-knuckled grasp of pitch and pace that will hamper the author’s telling of Dolly Wilde’s tale.

There is perhaps a genuinely moving, evocative woman’s story in Truly Wilde, but Schenkar never finds it. Dolly Wilde, denizen of fashionable Paris salons in the 1920s and ’30s, used her relationship and physical resemblance to her uncle as her passport to that rarefied world–but her own writing ability floundered in the shadow of her legendary uncle. That Dolly capitalized on Oscar but then suffered unfairly in comparison is a highly speculative conclusion, however, and Schenkar has substituted New Age psychobabble for research. Schenkar alleges that her methodology was a telepathic communion with Dolly Wilde from the great beyond. She uses astrology and palm-reading analysis for much of the rest of her work. All that is tangible of Dolly’s literary legacy are a handful of notes and letters that do not bear out much of anything.

Schenkar also glides over the implications of Dolly’s drug addiction and the subsequent heroin overdose that killed her at the age of 46. The one section of the book that does work is her re-creation of Dolly’s meeting with her future lover Natalie Barnes. Here, Schenkar displays her playwrighting background to animate the episode, and the reader glimpses what could have been if Schenkar had chosen to pursue a fictional biography instead of the crazy quilt of mixed impulses in Truly Wilde. NATE LIPPENS

Joan Schenkar reads Fri Feb 23, 5:30 pm at Elliott Bay Books.

LOST AND FOUND

THE VOID CAPTAIN’S TALE
by Norman Spinrad
Out of Print

If, as Milan Kundera claims, the purpose of the novel is to explore and expand
the territory of living-in-the-world, then the purpose of the science-fiction
novel must be even more far-reaching: to explore and expand living-in-the- world
through the lens of a credibly fabricated future extrapolated from the present.

So: Imagine interstellar travel as powered by a vegetable junkie’s experience of orgasmic nirvana. While thousands lie in suspended animation, the rich and their entourage live it up in a haze of hedonistic excess that you or I can only dream of. Once a day, the crew dumps a few numbers into the computer, the captain presses a button, and the ship instantaneously jumps a few light years ahead. No one knows what happens if the button is pressed without the numbers input, because no one’s ever returned to tell the tale.

The Void Captain’s Tale is many things: a tragic love story simultaneously enabled and doomed by technology; a tale of obsessive madness, of a mind taken over by a totalitarian idea of the absolute; a radical deconstruction of gender politics and the purpose of society nestled within the struggle to break free of maya and achieve nirvana. Above all, it’s the work of a respected master, arguably at the height of his powers–a finely crafted sci-fi milieu built up from the very language it uses to describe itself, in which the largest possible questions of conscious existence are explored and expanded. It’s out of print, but if you ever come across a copy, buy and read it. You’ll be glad you did. DALLAS TAYLOR