The Small Noise Upstairs 
Frank Kermode
- The Body Artist by Don DeLillo
The publishers describe this book as ‘lean’, which may be taken to refer to its style, though it also serves as a euphemism for ‘very short, especially considering the price’. Its immediate predecessor was Underworld, about seven times as long (or as fat). That book, as nearly everybody must know, begins with a chapter about a famous baseball game and a boy who retrieves the ball with which the decisive home run was scored. The Body Artist is about as long as the Underworld ball-game.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
At Tate Britain · William Blake
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
No Tricks · Raymond Carver
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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