The Body Artist

Rating:
Summary: Frustrating, but often stunning
Review: The Body Artist is unfulfilling and frustrating. It is basically a plotless meditaion on love, loss, and the confusion death brings. The appearence of Mr. Tuttle into the life and house of Lauren after the suicide of her husband, is unexplained. Is he an escaped mental patient, a ghost, a delusion of Lauren's grief? Don't expect an answer here because Delillo's not telling.
If it's so aggravating, why three stars? The beauty of the opening scene, a simple breakfast between Lauren and her husband, the description of Lauren's performance (She is the title character, an artist who creates with her body as the vehicle for her art) and many other scenes in this book are just sheer brilliance. Delillo's reasons for creating this book puzzles me, but some of the scenes within I will remember for a long time.

Rating:
Summary: Out of Body, Into Space and Time
Review: The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo, is an elusive meandering through the struggles of grief and acceptance. This being my first DeLillo novel, I wasn't sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised, and equally baffled. The story itself really only includes one charachter, and the inner workings of her mind as she descends into something that can only be described as overanylytical self destruction. She is Lauren Hartke, a performance artist who twists her body and voice in strange and painful contortions to expose truths about the world and herself. After the suicide of her husband, she secludes herself in their home and goes over tiny moments obsessively, searching for closure and meaning. She runs across a strange, transparent sort of charachter, who may or may not really exist outside herself. He speaks in her voice and the voice of her dead husband, seeming to transcend time and space and defy all set perimeters of logic and reason. This is an addictive collection of words, like a long muddled poem you can't stop reading. It leaves you with more questions than answers, and a sneaking sense of the truth that lies beyond our own perceptions.

Rating:
Summary: To review or not to review or perhaps
Review: The book is simultaneously a masterpiece and unfulfilling. DeLillo is a master in his use of language - the sentence can be jarring, incomplete, ambiguous, meandering as the plot line requires. An example: "She moved past the landing and turned into the hall, feeling whatever she felt, exposed, open, something you could call unlayered mayer, it that means anything, and she was aware of the world in every step." While I frequent enjoy movels specifically because of their use of language, I found DeLillo's writing jarring - there were sentences I had to reread in order to get the sense of them. I prefer to reread a sentence for the sensual pleasure of the words.

Similarly, I was both impressed and uneasy about his building of character. He does a splendid job of rooting the body artist in the physical, with an awareness of the physical that had, for me, an almost Zen-like quantity. This was used to advantage as her experiences after her husband's suicide lead to fluid boundaries of time, space, personhood, reality ... However, in the first chapter which sets up the story I found the discrepancy between her semi-awareness of thought and her physical rootedness created a character out of focus.

Nonetheless, while I've not been made a fan of DeLillo, anyone interested in the use of language in contemporary novels should read something by him - and this volume is an excellent choice.

Rating:
Summary: Not DeLillo's best, but certainly worth reading
Review: As I exited The Body Artist, I was left ambivalent rather than exalted.

First of all, I should mention that DeLillo uses a much more intimate style of writing than his readers may be used to; he manages to be laconic and rambling at the same time. The result can be dazzling: the author presents the protagonist, Laura, with such devout scrutiny that, at times, she almost becomes a palpable presence. His spectacularly precise observations on married life and mourning are also brilliant.

The plot, tenuous as it is, allows DeLillo to explore the themes of loss and the passage of time. He has managed to condense huge volumes of information into succinct sentences, such that the reader is sometimes made to read a sentence more than once. Some sentences appear to have been designed to change meaning with each rereading. This magnifies the power of DeLillo's insights on tragedy, it's effect on the victim and the slow sense of time that is engendered. So, although the novella is concise, it's effect on the reader is nonetheless equal to his longer novels.

Some readers have complained that The Body Artist is pointlessly flatulent. Occasionally, this is true. The Body Artist can be self-consciously poetic in execution. Unfortunately, also present is a sense of estrangement from Laura. In parts, The Body Artist verges on cold, unsympathetic semi-voyeurism. While one can never doubt the beauty of DeLillo's writing, the reader is rarely given the opportunity to truly empathise with Laura. It would also be accurate to say that, once in a while, DeLillo flaunts his articulacy in the same, slightly irritating way that he did in his earlier novels. These flaws hinder The Body Artist from matching his best works.

In spite of these shortcomings, the Body Artist can be profound, poignant and beautiful. It is a stirring sign of DeLillo reshaping his technique, his wholeness as a writer. Although it is not DeLillo's best work, it is a imperfect masterpiece that deserves your attention.

Rating:
Summary: Strangeness of grief
Review: The Body Artist is the strangest--most haunted--most terse portrayal of grief I've ever read. Both its beauty and its strangeness bloom from the melding of an inexact and painstakingly precise language. A language that is both lush--with a deep desire to come to terms with its own sweet grief--and stripped bare--all the way down to the white bone of honesty, to the complete despair of having lost the unnamable which feeds the spiritual and physical urges within us. DeLillo revels in memory here--clings to it-- as well as the ability to convey more through imprecision of language ("What's it called. She'd pressed down the lever to get his bread to go brown.") than through linguistic clarity. I gorged on DeLillo's stark novel(la) all night until there was nothing left of it to eat. The actual narrative is imbedded so deeply in the spareness of the language, the cutting short of the sentence, the acknowledged but forgotten sentence, that it was a second read before I cared whose grief I felt (and then, only vaguely), or what caused it. Even then, I found myself more invested in the metallic taste of the spoon carrying the load of fig traveling the distance from the page to my dry mouth. The Body Artist is weirdly both internal and external; what feels like an intimate place of entry into one woman's tumultuous and complex emotional terrain becomes a place of entry into the grief of its own readers, forcing us to examine (or simply enter into) the landscape of our longing and sadness through the doorway of our day-to-day, mechanical lives.

Rating:
Summary: Another Turn of The Screw
Review: Having read all of DeLillo's books ... this seems to be the most interesting. I have never have to read books twice to get the plot but this book presents the second time ever that I have had to do exactly that. I read Turn of the Screw four times before getting it. With the Body Artist, I had to read it three times to get to the essence of the book.

What is it with short novellas as ghost stories? Why are they thicker than they appear on paper.

The Body Artist is not my favorite work but the first chapter is so good.

Rating:
Summary: A brief diversion
Review: This is the second book I've read by DeLillo. The first, Underworld, is a hefty tome; this one is so brief it is actually questionable that it can be called a novel. Certainly, the idea of paying a hardcover price for this book is ludicrous unless you're a diehard DeLillo fan.

This is kind of a ghost story, but there is more of a psychological than supernatural element to this ghost. As with Underworld, I found this book to be fascinating without really being very clear. DeLillo is brilliant at focusing on the minor details of life, but he makes it hard to see the bigger picture.

It is also hard to get very interested in the main character in this story who is so self-absorbed that she has practically shut out the outside world. A protagonist does not necessarily have to be sympathetic, but she should at least be interesting, and this one is not.

If you like descriptive language and are not too big on story or character, you might enjoy this book.

Rating:
Summary: A Low-Key but Contemplative Outing from DeLillo
Review: After his sprawling 'Underworld', DeLillo wrote this whimsy of a book. But don't be fooled by the slimness of this volume... the themes of love, loss and death are probed as thoroughly and poetically as only DeLillo knows how.

Lauren's observations in the beginning are masterfully written. Everyday events and ritualistic details are written with an elliptical, but precise grace. It's a deliberate slowing down of the cognitive process (of Lauren's, and in turn, ours) to plumb the mysteries of what we commonly take as given.

Rey's death resounds throughout the book, and the weird stranger/ghost that inhabits the house is one of the most haunting characters/ideas I've read in recent years. Lauren's sense of loss, and the physical craving to fill such loss, such sorrow are expertly drawn, with unflinching emotional honesty.

It's a refreshing surprise to find that one of the most maximalist, post-modern fictioneers we have in America is also one of the more intricate miniaturists. Very impressive.

Rating:
Summary: A deception
Review: This book has been debated ad nauseam--is it brilliant, or is it thin? Despite all the hype, the postmodern techniques Dellilo employs have been used before by better writers for better purposes. This book is a slight achievement in both size as well as substance. But Delillo has reached that level of fame where each book becomes a juggernaut, so backed by money, advertising, and blurbs by other writers that it is guaranteed to succeed commercially. If this book had been published under a pseudonym or annonymously, it would have instantly disappeared from view. The writing is so labored, so agonizingly bent on appearing profound, that there is no spontaneity. Self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness are not necessarily proofs of depth. Delillo begins to sound like a parody of himself.

Rating:
Summary: Gut-wrenching...In A Bad Way
Review: I love finding good, short novels - novels I can get engrossed in and conquer in one sitting, written so well they leave you wanting more. So when I'm in the mood for a short novel, I'll walk the aisles of the local bookstore and pluck a few thin volumes from the shelves. I had long been interested in The Body Artist but was unwilling to pay... for the hardcover. But when the paperback appeared, it was one of those titles I picked up.

Unfortunately, The Body Artist is not a good short novel. It is not engrossing, rather it is slow moving with poorly developed characters and absolutely no action to drive what little plot there is. The only shred of hope for this little novel is the language with which it is written. DeLillo is clearly a fine author. But there's not a great deal of proof to back it up here.