Rating: 
Summary: Enigmatic and haunting
Review: I just finished this novella and came to the computer. I wanted to put my thoughts down for others here to read. When I closed the covers of this book, I was totally lost. In a fog. Then it began to lift and I had a revelation about what had actually happened to Lauren Hartke, the "body artist" of the title. This is potentially a spoiler, so stop reading now if you don't want any insight to this enigmatic little book. The key to this novel, in a small way, is the phone call from the ex-wife of Lauren's husband, filmmaker Rey Robles. Rey went to his ex-wife's apartment and committed suicide. Rey and Lauren have only been married for a very short time, so short that he doesn't even know if Lauren likes juice or not. When the ex-wife calls Lauren, she says Rey killed himself at her apartment because she knew everything about him...all his little idiosyncracies, his habits. The ex-wife predicted the suicide, knew he would do it eventually. Lauren, on the other hand, never got to know Rey at all. So, when Lauren returns to the beach house she and Rey shared during their short marriage, it seems time has stopped in a way. There is a mysterious man living in the upstairs room that mimics conversations she and her husband had, little moments she had completely forgotten. She tapes them and becomes obessed with them, begs the stranger to speak in her dead husband's voice so she can hear it over and over. The stranger predicts the future in small ways too, of how things will be when Lauren ends the grieving process and lets time flow again. Because Lauren is a body artist (a bizarre type of performance art), she can make herself become other people. A review of Lauren's performance at the end of the novel, leaves the reviewer in shock, as she literally watches Lauren transform into other people. By book's end, it is fairly obvious the stranger in the beach house is Lauren herself, not really another person. She has created this man to help her recapture the lost moments with her new husband, and to show her what the future will be without him. This is just my take on the novel. I'd love to hear others. Delillo brillantly leaves the loose ends untied and leaves the reader to sort out the mysteries of life and death and how we can bend the boundaries of time if we allow ourselves to shrug off the limits we have all placed on ourselves. Fascinating reading from a master of the English language.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, thought-provoking parable...
Review: The Body Artist is an interesting, engaging rumination. I do, however, have one piece of advice: be sure you are in the mood to read this book. It's not your typical novel, because it appears to be flat and uneventful -- in other words, no plot to speak of. But it will make you think about the nature of identity and what makes us who we are. The Body Artist is really more of a parable than a novel. The two main characters -- Lauren, a "body artist" who turns her own body into nothingness and a strange man who had until recently lived secretly in her home and who has the gift of mimicking other people's voices, but with no voice of his own -- are interesting in their bizarre similarities. But nothing really happens to them. Even so, DeLillo writes with marvelous, beautiful prose. Read this if you are in the mood for something experimental, literary and thought provoking.
Rating:
Summary: A good book for some
Review: This is a not a dramatic book. This is a book that you read on a rainy afternoon in one sitting and bathe in the mood. The sentences are short at times, choppy and fragmented--a complaint made by the current "spot light reviewer". This is done for reason, for mood, and for effect. To some it may feel like a published experimental garbage-dump only gotten into print because of DeLillo's fantastic reputation. However, to read this book well you have to look at it as a whole. The title, "The Body Artist", has as much bearing on this short work as the characters inside it. There is a backround of artistry, one of ambiguous interpretation not unlike those "new age" plays shown in the city. The book is light and dense at the same time; some of the sentences will strike you as odd and uneeded with no depth, while other scenes will captivate you with an overwhelming feeling of depression--hopefully lasting throughout the length of the novel. While I was reading, the book almost called for a scholarly analysis of theme and characterization: like I said, if read right the feeling of despair and eccentricity will seep into you. Read it with an artistic viewpoint and you'll be nicely rewarded.
Rating:
Summary: showcases delillo's strengths, hides his weaknesses
Review: i picked this book up because i was intruiged by the cover and had recently become enamoured with essays of delillos. i read this very short novel in less than three hours - not only because of it's length (or lack thereof) but because i was wrapped up in mystery introduced in the first ten pages. as in most of his work, this book is rich with delillo's stark and barren description. he is able to create a very particular mood and tone and has an excellent writerly voice. in some of his other work, his dialogue was weak; it came off as affected, as his characters spoke in the richly desctiptive words of delillo's narration. this intricacy works in prose, but when real people are supposed to be speaking. it was always a pet peeve of mine. however, in the body artist, there is very little, if any, dialogue. this strengthens the book enourmously and lets you become completely caught up in the lonely, post-modern world that delillo paints witout getting hung up on his usually implausable, clumsy dialogue. a great read, especially if you'd like a quick, intense, one-sitting-read of a book.
Rating: 
Summary: An intoxicating expression of abrupt loss of love
Review: This seems to be a year when we are facing our mortality with writers and Don DeLillo's "The Body Artist" is a surprise phenomenon. Never thought this gifted writer could step away from his intricately substantiated chronicles of Americana and be so pensive. Many readers are complaining that this book is obtuse, that it goes nowhere, that it is about nothing. And if you expect a rapid read of a short novella then those criticisms might be understood. But open that carefully locked door that guards your psyche and I think you will find that the writing of this book is a little miracle. DeLillo presents us with a character's mind-wanderings that explore the black hole that occurs when someone we love is suddenly dead, gone, not here. It is not difficult to travel along the road of stream of consciouness, repeated phrases, specters, longed for reincarnations, ache for touch, for holding and being held, for hearing words that were so taken for granted as part of everyday conversation that they just keep surfacing; it just takes some time. Making his main character a body artist suggests that it is the artist who can best express this void, drawing on the unused synapses of our brain to suggest explanations for the unexplainable. Is there a real 'house guest" after Rey's suicide, or is this preoccupation with a corporal form another mode of communication with Rey's absence? Do we know love unless we lose it? Life goes on, grows routine. An unexpected trauma (is it our fault?, do we assume guilt because we can't understand?) explodes our globe of existence, and abruptly life's routine dissolves, leaving Nothingness in its wake until we sort it out. I think this is a brilliant book; I've read it three times now in one day, and I'm still growing from it and into it. DeLillo has given us the opposite of his usual documented historically edged books and has done it surpassingly well. WHAT A JOURNEY!!!!!!!!!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Quick read
Review: I really loved the premise. I was fascinated about it. I think it would make a wonderful movie or play. It was a quick read and held my attention. I really would like to see the whole premise even taken farther. I was a bit dissapointed that we didn't focus on "Mr. Tuttle" more - I could've read about him even more.
Rating:
Summary: A HAUNTING NOVELLA ABOUT THE SHATTERING EFFECTS OF DEATH
Review: This is not an easy novel, and don't let its length (a mere 124 pages) let you think otherwise. The plot is anything but usual. After a young artist's husband commits suicide, she resumes her life only to one day discover a strange person sitting on a bed in an unused room, an otherworldly man-child who speaks in cryptic utterances that lack context and syntax. She assumes that he suffers from autism and plans to notify authorities; but changes her mind after hearing him repeat, word for word, a conversation she had with her husband on the day of his death. Wow. Who is this quaint stranger -- unwilling time traveler? Is our protagonist no more than a desperate woman whose grief and isolation have made her delusional? At first I was somewhat frustrated by these questions, but found myself haunted by the layered meanings. When it was not the prose that had me thinking, I was smitten with DeLillo's fascinatingly poetic writing style. He weaves such a riveting tapestry of words to delve into the emotional minutiae of his characters that he not only captivates our sympathetic attention he has us thinking like we were the ones he was talking about. I highly recommend this effortlessly engrossing tale if you have a taste for offbeat but thought-provoking literature.
Rating: 
Summary: unbelievable......just how bad this is
Review: I can honestly say this is one of the worst books I've ever read. It is poorly written, excruciatingly boring and proof-positive that a big name can get anything published. The only redeeming feature of this book is that it is a mere 124 pages in length. The jacket description isn't even close to accurate unless by "spare and seductive" they meant spare on entertainment and that it seduces you to sleep. I'm going to give some of DeLillo's other work a chance because of the rave reviews I've read. This however, is not the place to start investigating his work.
Rating:
Summary: Who knows anything about anyone?
Review: Don Delillo writes about another America, where there are no great heroics, soaring of spirit, nor great moral battles. He tells of the defeated, confused, and estranged who live the one life they have as only they know how. In The Body Artist the struggle is distilled within a single woman, who copes with the suicide of her husband as her mind leads her body, in solitude. There is a startling lack of overt sentimentality which would have spoiled the story. Rather the emptiness she must feel is conveyed through her gestures and stalk sceneries surrounding her solitary life in a large rented house. Underneath the apparent disaffectedness of the heroine, however, readers perceive her doubts, rage, and longing, which materialize halfway as a timeless man/child of no origin. We read the heroine's lonely and circular struggle to cope with what life has dealt her, through her relationship with the non-character, and in the end some kind of an expression of understanding(?) or an attempt to close an event, which none of us should have the presumption to judge. Mr. Delillo would object, but I finished the story with a moral: that we each of us perceive the external world through the fogginess of our inner uncertainties, and that to understand others is perhaps an ability to wipe the slate of your own understanding clean. The charge of boredom by some reviewers is regretful. No, there's neither resolution nor triumph over the tragedy, but it's very rare that our lives offer any kind of resolution. As for the breakfast scene at the beginning, I think it tells us the intimacy and familiarity the man and the woman share at dawn, which makes the loss of the husband all the more personal to us. I also read into the dialogues an underlining tension which could be a foreboding of an end. In any case I personally enjoyed the subtleties of the scene immensely. This is a subtle and beautiful story with its own unique ambience that pulls you right in if you like the style. I'd even say that I, for one, prefer the more distilled form of this personal struggle to conspiracies and social satire of Mr. Delillo's previous works.
Rating:
Summary: The Magician
Review: I can't believe how many readers have been seduced by this goobledygook sophomoric word play. The success of any writer is his or her ability to tell a tale, seductively, clearly, and -- perchance -- poetically. Mr. Delillo does not have this talent.
James Joyce was a poet and by his own admission a comic. Mr. Delillo is no Joyce and if he is trying to be, he has yet to succeed. I can't imagine any seasoned reader who does not see through this trickery. This piece of work is a deceit and a bore.
When one is told to imagine a brown piece of paper as a dead, headless squirrel I would hope they are taking serious medication to rise to the occasion. And, speaking of that...let me get an aspirin, although it took a few minutes to read this garbage, I have a splitting headache.
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