Ghost story

Ever since I bought it months ago, the copy of Don DeLillo's 'Underworld' has been perched untouched on the bookshelf. It's just such a daunting weighty tome that I haven't been able to bring myself to steel myself, pick it up and begin. So I decided instead to tackle his much shorter novel 'The Body Artist' first - the theory being that it would be easier to dip my toes in the paddling pool than to plunge headfirst into the deep end.

And I'm so glad I did.

'The Body Artist' is an astonishing book. In some ways it's rather like 'Donnie Darko' - beautiful, enchanting, mesmeric but not immediately (or perhaps even ultimately) comprehensible. It's so short that it's more a novella or even a short story than a fully-fledged novel, and this physical slightness is replicated in the remarkable slightness of the prose. Appropriately enough for a book which deals with the impact of a death and all the subsequent haunting echoes and resonances, 'The Body Artist's prose is ethereal, oblique, not-quite-there, so light that it barely seems to touch the page, and yet at the same time strangely rich. On this evidence DeLillo is the sort of writer who makes you marvel at his mastery of words, and opens your eyes as to the creative possibilities of language.

All of which forms quite a contrast to one of the last books I read, Tom Wolfe's 'The Bonfire Of The Vanities'. To some extent I think it succeeds as an encyclopoedic portrait of a city and an era, but the cultural dissection and satire could have been sharper ('American Psycho' cuts it to shreds) and although I liked much of the dialogue and some of the images, the writing never left me breathless in the way that the work of other authors can - and has, in the case of 'The Body Artist'.

From what I can gather, 'Underworld' is a very different sort of novel (and equally different from the earlier 'White Noise'), but this little aperitif has given me a real appetite for the big feast.