Rating: 
Summary: "it absorbs me in a disinterested way"
Review: coming off the epic sprawl that was *underworld*, don delillo returns with a slim tome -- some 128 pages or so -- that is a marked departure for the author. as i began the novel, it struck me more as an experiment than as a novel but subtly *the body artist* works its charms, a testament to the author's skill. it deals with issues of identity crisis, love, despair, and dislocation in a profound and romantic manner.the novel is about lauren hartke, a body artist celebrated for her ability to push the limits of human capabilities. she has just suffered through a tragedy and is trying to cope with its repercussions in her home along the coast, far removed from society. it is during this time that she encounters a stranger in her home, an adult child who seems to be beyond both space and time, an idiot savant with a gift for mimicry, but most of all he knows things he shouldn't and it is all of the qualities that draw lauren into his world. *the body artist* is very much like this mysterious guess: abstract and yet strangely beguiling. i finished it in one sitting, unable to put it down, anxious about where delillo was taking me next. one gets the sense that, ultimately, hartke is envious of the fellow -- who she names "mr. tuttle -- and his ability to come and go as he pleases, to deal with the world on his own terms or just not deal with it at all. she tries to learn from him and his ways, to find out what it is that he is there to show to her. in a mock article near novel's end, we see the culmination of all of the events that have transpired to date. through lauren, delillo himself seems to speak to his audience about his desire to do something new. what's most striking is the novel's minimalism: entire pages of one word sentences, the narrative presented as thought process, very little dialogue. for the most part it works, though there are stretches of rather limp and lifeless prose. what's most encouraging though is that *the body artist* is about characters: as i was saying to a friend yesterday, delillo, while utilizing a great number of characters, writes about plots and not people. *the body artist* demonstrates that he does in fact have a keen understanding of human nature, and in doing so he's written his most haunting novel to date.
Rating: 
Summary: first but not the last
Review: This is the first book of Don Delillo's I've read. It was a good choice, short, sweet, strange.....but enough to wet the appetite for more. Mr. Delillo's use of language in this book is amazing. His sentences are spare, the dialogue echoes, conveying the backward/forward slipping of time like the seashore they walk upon. In all, the story caputures the search of someone who has lost a loved one in death, the walk through familiar rooms hoping to find a remenent, an echo of the loved one's voice.
Rating:
Summary: Tempting the language
Review: "The Body Artist" is not the book that will get you started on DeLillo as it's different from all his previous works in many ways and a rather hard one to get at. It is a very intimate and profound look into language itself and an emotional inquiry into how we construct reality. If you take interest in these themes this book might take you on a daring journey into the very texture of our linguistically overshaped mind just as it has taken DeLillo himself to a new level of literary exploration. Lauren Hartke, the novella's protagonist, is a real enough character to draw you in as she gets confronted with her husband's death and the experience of being left behind. As this sets the stage for her mental quest, a nameless intruder might provide her with the means to experience herself anew. Written in an absolutely stunning, unprecedented style it is worth the read for every-one DeLillo specialist and those who like to get a new grip or astounding perspective on postmodern times - all the more relevant as they are ours to live in...
Rating:
Summary: A PERPLEXING, PLEASING, ALWAYS ABSORBING LISTEN
Review: An acknowledged master of the literary arts, Don DeLillo once described a common thread that ran throughout his books as "...the individual faced with a vast structure...one person adrift, faced with a monumental superstructure that he can't make headway against." Such is surely the case with his latest provocative work, "The Body Artist." Here we meet a woman confronted with her husband's death by his own hand. She remains in their remote home, where she eventually finds an unusual man in an abandoned third floor room. Is he real or a product of her saddened and perhaps delusional mind? Listeners will have to decide for themselves after hearing this brief but brilliant reading by Laurie Anderson. I say brief because the novel is only 125 pages, which simply illustrates that DeLillo doesn't need length to convey his intriguing thoughts. Some may be perplexed; others pleased. Most will be absorbed.
Rating:
Summary: Superior
Review: DeLillo gets it. A novel of supreme psychological and metaphysical insight, intuitive craftsmanship, and compassion. What a virtuoso! What range. Don't expect White Noise or Underworld. Check all irony, chronic bitterness, and romanticized misery at the door. Portrait of an Artist Understanding, Finally, Death and Art.
Rating: 
Summary: No is there now
Review: What was is this? Not much is this. No laugh this time. Instead figs, birds, pumice. Little stange man in shorts. Now you see him, now you don't. Like smoke. Like this book. No Libra is this. No white noise or running dogs or end zone. No baseball or Lenny Bruce in underworld. More like Beckett rearranging the furniture. On the verge of breakdown. Mr. DeLillo be well I hope. I miss his funny.
Rating: 
Summary: Well that was unexpected.
Review: If you liked _Libra_ or _White Noise_ or _Underworld_, you're likely to be disappointed by _The Body Artist_. Upon close inspection, you can tell it's written by the same guy--as others have noted, it includes his trademark incisive and sharp-eyed depiction of the quotidian--but he throws in this whole surreal/mystical thing that I don't recall having encountered in his previous work. That alone is OK by me; definitely don't have a problem with someone as talented as D.D. branching out in new directions. But I felt that he didn't quite pull it off effectively. The plot lacked the tension, and the style the crispness, that kept me racing through his other stuff. TBA is also probably the most intimate of his novels, which requires a bit of an adjustment for the reader if he is accustomed to dealing with the broad social themes with which one becomes accustomed to dealing after reading a lot of DeLillo. They're still there, I think, but you'll be required to ruminate a little longer to figure them out. Overall, not awful, and probably worth the couple hours it'll take to read it. Just don't expect _Underworld_.
Rating:
Summary: How sparing of self
Review: Being a fan of Underworld and The Names, I probably would have gone out and read The Body Artist even without the reviews, but one review in particular(Michiko Kakutani NY Times 1/19) quotes the only really nice passage in the whole book, "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." That one passage is enough for me to justify reading the book, but I think that for the most part, DeLillo consistently fails whenever he starts talking art (Klara Sax, Great Jones Street- too painful to read).
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo's Most Daring Work Yet
Review: Some may dismiss "The Body Artist" as a minor work after DeLillo's sprawling masterpiece "Underworld." In heft, this is a lighter work, an easy evening read. But in style and subject, DeLillo breaks new ground with this novel and achieves surprising poignancy. The book begins with DeLillo's trademark observation -- a couple, unknown to us, go through a morning's breakfast routine. Here DeLillo is the DeLillo we know, microanalyzing how Rey spoons the insides of a fig and spreads it on his toast, repeating three, four, five times how Lauren must push the toaster lever down twice to get bread toasted the way she likes. In previous novels, DeLillo has used this technique to point out the banality of modern life, and I assumed he was doing it again. But "The Body Artist" is not "White Noise." Lauren Hartdke is not everywoman, she is a flesh and blood character dealing with painful loss. To say much more about the plot would risk giving everything away -- after all, the story is less than 120 pages. It's the size and form of a short story and should be read like one, in one sitting. I can say that DeLillo reinvents himself with this work, finding beauty in modern banality, even sorrow in its loss. For all the intellect and power in DeLillo's previous works, they could leave many readers cold. "The Body Artist" is a beautiful exercise for DeLillo, evidence that one of our finest living writers may have his best works ahead of him.
Rating:
Summary: BRIEF, BRILLIANT, BEAUTIFUL, HAUNTING
Review: DeLillo is perhaps the best literary novelist we have at this time, which the career-defining masterwork "Underworld" made clear to his largest readership yet: at the end of all those perfect sentences , sallow images and and long, winding, aching paragraphs is a narrative voice whose intelligence engages the fractured nature of identity in a media-glutted age. "The Body Artist" has him contracting the narrative concerns to a tight, elliptical 128 pages, where the Joycean impulse to have a private art furnish meaning to grievous experience is prefered over the dead promises of religion and philosophy. What exactly the woman character does with her performance body art, what the point is of her ritutalized , obsessed cleansing of her body, is a mystery of DeLilloian cast, but it's evident that we're witnessing to a private ritual whose codes won't reveal themselves, but are intended as a way for the woman to again have a psychic terrain she can inhabit following the sudden and devastating death of her film maker husband. The entrance of the stranger in the cottage turns her aesthetic self-absorption , slowly but inevitably, into a search into her past in order to give her experience meaning, resonance, a project she quite handily ignores until then. The sure unveiling of her psychic life is a haunting literary event. DeLillo's language is crisp, evocative, precise to the mood and his ideas: you envy his flawless grasp of rhythm and diction as these traits simultaneously make the cottage on the cold , lonely coast seem sharp as snap shot, but blurred like old memory, roads and forests in a foggy shroud. A short, haunted masterwork.
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