After the 12-course meal that was Don DeLillo's 1997 magnum opus, UNDERWORLD, his new novel, THE BODY ARTIST, running only 124 large-type pages, may strike readers as a mere after-dinner mint. But don't be fooled; this is a novella that demands --- and deserves --- slow, careful study. It's a book you may well want to read three times: once for the story, again for the spare, solemn prose, and a third time for the metaphysical implications.

The "body artist" of the title is Lauren Hartke, a young woman who practices a discipline that incorporates equal parts pantomime, contortionism, and ventriloquy. She lives with her husband, Rey, a forgotten director of art-house films, in a rented house on a lonely stretch of New England coast.

Following Rey's unexpected suicide, Lauren resumes her life only to discover one day a strange person sitting on a bed in a disused room, an otherworldly man-child who speaks in cryptic utterances that lack context and syntax. She assumes that he suffers from autism or mental illness and plans to notify authorities; but changes her mind after hearing him repeat, word for word and intonation for intonation, a conversation she had with Rey on the day of his death.

The man says other inexplicable things, discussing events, such as an approaching rainstorm, as though they had already happened. As the days go by, Lauren fixates on the man, whom she calls Mr. Tuttle after a schoolteacher from her childhood. She imagines him to be, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, adrift in an undifferentiated sea of time, a figure whose lack of any past or future makes him a stranger to his own life. What captivates her above all is his apparent ability to channel Rey: "[H]e knew how to make her husband live in the air that rushed from his lungs into his vocal folds --- air to sounds, sounds to words, words the man shaped fatefully on his lips and tongue."

Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, Mr. Tuttle vanished again, and Lauren is left alone to make sense of the episode through her esoteric art, and to begin the grieving process anew.

It's a plot that is both as simple as a haiku and as complex as particle physics, simultaneously occupying multiple quantum states. Is Mr. Tuttle really an unwilling time traveler? Is Lauren no more than a desperate woman whose grief and isolation have made her irrational? Are time and identity really the same substance, like matter and energy?

Rewarding as the book can be as a metaphysical exploration, readers of THE BODY ARTIST may find themselves frustrated by its protagonist, who comes off as something of a cipher. Inscrutable to begin with, she seems to fade before our eyes as the story unfolds, becoming faint and insubstantial like Mr. Tuttle as she disengages from everything around her. "I am Lauren. But less and less," she tells herself. As the story nears its ambiguous conclusion, she seems in danger of vanishing too, but it is hard to care, so alien has she become. Even her thoughts have come to resemble Mr. Tuttle's: "Being here has come to me. Because it was lonely, this coast in the season, and because she had to touch the newel every time."

Still, for those more interested in meanings than answers, THE BODY ARTIST is a quietly engrossing tale from one of America's most brilliant and serious-minded writers.