Rating: 
Summary: Bad way to begin a book (by Gary Schwind)
Review: I never got through a book as quickly as I got through this one. That's because I didn't actually read the whole thing. I read only the first chapter, which is an utter bore. It is all about a couple's breakfast routine. While I give DeLillo credit for being able to write more about such a thing than I could, it simply isn't interesting. Add to that the fact that it is completely disjointed and what you've got is a bad way to lead off a book. I skimmed through the rest of the book and found nothing that intrigued me enough to actually read. It is a short book, so it wouldn't take long to read, but save yourself the time and find something else.
Rating: 
Summary: Show me the body
Review: Don Delillo follows up his largest and finest work - 'Underworld' - with perhaps his smallest and poorest work: 'The Body Artist'. While the dust-jacket calls this piece of fiction a novel, it is clearly a novella. At only 124 pages, and with only one focal character, there isn't enough intermingled complexity to make it a novel, and not enough 1-2-3 punch to make it a long short story. Delillo's tone is consistent with his other works: the characters all sound the same and seem to pine for some sort of normalcy. The quest at understanding the postmodern is dwindling away, along with the cold-war and garbage, as some of Delillo's obsessions. What we have here is a sort of super-existentialism. Lauren Hartke is a body artist - she puts her body into strange shapes and under constant pressure - and she is haunted. Her obsession with her own body serves as a clue to her complete lack of comprehension of all those outside of her body. Her husband, her friends, her acquaintances - they are all strangers. 'The Body Artist' is about these ghosts: mostly regular people, but still intangible to Lauren. Delillo is still a master on his worst day, and moments of this book do shine. Only Delillo could conjure up so pure a ghost story without using a shred of the supernatural. Hartke's obsessions creep up just slowly enough to almost be unnoticeable to us. By the end, we readers are able to snap out of the scenario and realize its craziness. But for Lauren - trapped in her own world and body - this realization is not as plausible. Dellilo's faults her are not with subject. His intent is as noble as ever. The words themselves just don't work as well. Perhaps after 'Underworld's' massiveness, he felt an urgency to 'crank something out' - and here it is: a little under-developed novella. Despite its flaws, it is still a necessary chapter in Don Dellilo's oeuvre.
Rating: 
Summary: Ahhh!
Review: Now, I'm no fan of this book's predecessor, 'Underworld', but 'The Body Artist' is a sublime, superbly crafted and touching story. It will take you no time to read, and you'll feel better for it. Hurray!
Rating: 
Summary: For anyone who has felt a loss
Review: This novella is a prose poem about grief and loss, beautifully done as only DiLillo can write, with a masterful command of words; full of the not-quite said and not quite real. A very different work from his White Noise and Underworld.
Rating:
Summary: As thin as the author thinks our lives are
Review: "The Body Artist" is a refreshing switch from Delillo's ponderous, doorstop epic "Underworld." Both novels began with brilliant expositions of what was to come, and both novels dissipated into commentaries on our own transient worthlessness, "Underworld" focusing on a macro-component and "The Body Artist" focusing on the micro-component to our eternal conundrum. The premise of "The Body Artist" is intriguing, and boldly details what most people, in their quotidian existence, try not to dwell on. In the end, Lauren Hartke is not as realistic as the cast of "White Noise" - my favorite by Delillo - and she exists in a purely contemplative world, on the page, from the author's mind to the reader's. For Delillo fans only.
Rating:
Summary: The Fragment Artist
Review: Don DeLillo is the master of the fragment. The master fragment. What I mean is. Do people, somewhere, actually talk like? What is somewhere?
I know I've never met anyone who. But in the novel. The writing is tantalizing. Unfortunately it doesn't lead to.
Rating: 
Summary: Body Artist is the Emperor with No Clothes
Review: The Body Artist by Don DeLillo is a good example of "The Emperor Has No Clothes" syndrome in a book. It is creatively experimental, parts are breathtaking in its poetic observation, it is fascinating at times, but ultimately, the story is confusing and not especially interesting - although at a little more than 100 pages you don't have time to become completely bored. It is possible that in Mr. DeLillo's quest to write something out of the ordinary, he has left most readers behind. I strongly recommend his brilliant novel "White Noise" (5 of 5 stars for me), and his equally brilliant "Libra" over this highly creative but confusing experiment that didn't always work.
Rating:
Summary: Um....what?
Review: Did I miss something?? This book is beautifully written but completely without point or plot. I kept reading it only based on the fact that I thought there would be some revelation at the end explaining what the rest of the book was supposed to mean, but there never is. I finished this book feeling unsatisfied. If you don't like stream of consciousness writing, this probably isn't for you either.
Rating:
Summary: How much ambiguity can you accept?
Review: The Body Artist is one of the strangest--and most seductive--books I've read in a long time, a "ghost story" with a character who is described as if he were real, and whom the main character believes to be real, and who may, in fact, be real--but who may also be a figment of imagination. Events which are described as real may be fantasies, and even the relationships the main character has or has had with people who seem to be real may, in fact, be colored by wishful thinking. Ultimately, even the linear progression of the narrative itself is called into question since, DeLillo tells us, "Past, present, and future are not amenities of language." The story begins with the intimately described minutiae of breakfast, as a couple, married just a short time, gets ready for the day. We learn that it takes two cycles on the toaster to get the bread the right color, that the cup is his and the paper is hers, that a blue jay comes to the bird feeder, that she puts soya on her cereal and that it smells like feet. When Rey Robles, the husband, dies later that day (something we know from the beginning), the world of the wife, Lauren Hartke, changes from one of communication and an outward focus to a world of grief and an inward focus. When she discovers a stranger living on the third floor of her rented house, we aren't sure whether he is real or whether he materializes to show Lauren's unresolved feelings about her loss and the depth of her trauma. The stranger, dubbed Mr. Tuttle, is handicapped, unable to understand or communicate in language in any traditional way. Fascinating in its focus on internal action, the reader must ultimately just accept the story for what it is while enjoying the glories of the meticulous prose, the acutely felt portrait of a woman grieving, the suggested symbolism in birds and nature, and the author's depiction of the ambiguities and uncertainties of life and time. This is a work which uses language in new ways, ultimately even calling into question the use of language itself to make sense of the world. Like Lauren, DeLillo himself is a performance artist.
Rating:
Summary: Forever etched in my psyche
Review: This is one long beautiful poem. Really. Raw, complex poetry. So intense in fact, that you have to pay attention or you'll miss it. The plot is simple. There is a widow grieving her husband's death, there is a stranger who shows up for a season (literally or not) then leaves again. There is her performance...an account of the entire experience. But lets throw plots and whatnot to the wind for a second. This guy's writing reminds me of lovemaking. He takes you through this hazy tunnel where everything is magnified and significant. A bird outside a window...pouring juice in a glass. You get lost in the wife's grief. It becomes the readers grief as well. This is a work of poetry. When I turned the final page I found myself staring at the wall for an eerie second before I came back to reality.
An awesome writer...I'd recommend this for any literary group or class.
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