In his twelfth novel, Don DeLillo switches gears and slows down. "Time is the only narrative that matters," he writes. "It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it." But in the opening pages of this Pinteresque work, 36-year-old Lauren Hartke and her 64-year-old husband Rey Robles are bogged down in the slow motion of a breakfast meal together. He's a film director, and she's a body artist. Rey makes quite a production out of shaking the orange juice container while Lauren drifts in and out of reality: "She took a bite of cereal and forgot to taste it. She lost the taste of it somewhere between the time she put the food in her mouth and the regretful second she swallowed it."
Then before they have time to live more fully in the present moment, they are separated forever: Rey commits suicide at his first wife's home. Lauren is grief-stricken — "She wanted to disappear in Rey's smoke, be dead, be him." Then a slightly deranged man appears in the house she is renting. Lauren, baffled by his oddness, names him Mr. Tuttle after one of her high school science teachers. Is he an alien, Rey's ghost, a Zen master come to teach her the art of living in the present? He violates the limits of the human," notes the novelist. Lauren works her body hard, trying to prepare for an upcoming performance at the Boston Center for the Arts. But the old regimen doesn't clear things up or unravel the mysteries.
In this unsettling novel about the dynamics of grief and the metaphysical tricks of time and creativity, Don DeLillo circles around the big "D" word: "Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the ones you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take." Grief is a scene-stealer and it takes center stage for as long as it takes, even though the other players are anxious and impatient for things to return to normal.
Don DeLillo deepens the purifying mysteries that swirl around the death of a loved one.
