The Body Artist

Rating:
Summary: Where the words take you...
Review: An extraordinary work of sustained and haunting beauty, from an American master known for his brilliantly inventive, erudite, precise, and dryly humorous novels about life in a world besieged by hidden conspiracies, media culture, terrorism, and technological dominance. But as profoundly relevant as these novels are to our times, they are often criticized for a lack of real warmth, a coldness brought on by intellectual distance. In The Body Artist, however, DeLillo continues the greater soulfulness he began exploring in his previous novel, Underworld, and burrows into the more humane -- bodily -- concerns of time, love, memory, and perception. In a kind of incantatory prose, DeLillo effortlessly submerges the reader into the life of Lauren Hartke, a performance artist living a solitary existence on a lonely coast in a rented house. One day a strange, ageless man, who possesses an uncanny knowledge of her life, as well as the life she shared with her departed husband, appears out of nowhere, and through their chance encounter, Lauren discovers a deeper, contextual sense of who she is. At 124 pages The Body Artist is more a novella than novel, but then not exactly. It could just as easily be a prose poem, a parable, or a prayer, because its power lies not so much in its printed words but where the words take you, begging the question of who the body artist really is -- Lauren Hartke, DeLillo, or you.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and Obscure
Review: As an English/Literature major in the late 60's I was required to read a lot of avant garde fiction that seemed little more than a stream of consciousness exercise in language. In listening to this book, I felt like I was experiencing a flashback. Laurie Anderson was brilliant (thus 3 stars instead of 2) and because of her reading I stayed with the book to the end. I kept hoping for something profound or thought-provoking and was ultimately disappointed. I have to agree with the reviewer who said that had this been a first book, it would have been rejected. I'll also add that had it been a first book, reviewers would not have been so generous with their accolades.

Rating:
Summary: In the world, but not of it?
Review: Elusive, gently mysterious, subtle warps in perception of time. The opening scene is a study in mindfulness; almost hyperawareness. It's very internal, under the skin of the experience.

When her husband dies, Lauren tries to erase herself. To make herself go away? To get at what lies beneath the flesh and bones?

And that stranger . . . He's not completely 'there,' seems to exist in more than one time frame (in one of which time is not linear), and is in the process of creating himself by imitating things he's seen and heard in Lauren's past and future. Who is he? There's no answer; perhaps there's not meant to be one.

Time -- our perception of it versus nonlinear time -- is somehow at the core of this novella. But just when you feel you're getting close to a clue, whatever was in your mind slips away. There are no answers (or, for that matter, questions). There's just 'what is.'

When Rey's ex-wife and Lauren's friend enter the story, they barge in like uninvited guests. They don't belong. Lauren herself is different when around them. The external world is a brash intrusion into the not quite so material realm in which Lauren exists when in the home she and Rey rented. Where the stranger appears out of thin air, it seems.

A story that seduces and haunts.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: ...Despite the energy directed to this slim novel, there is little to discuss here. In all fairness, the true art to be found is DeLillo's use of language and his observation of everyday life. Yet he has abandoned any concept of plot in this novel, any attempt at creating a conflict...The novel does have a haunting quality, and the presense of a stranger rambling disconnected phrases is an interesting commentary on human communication, but the characters themselves are nothing more than stock descriptions. "The Body Artist," in the end, is a stream of consciousness book, a list of observations and descriptions by DeLillo, each so detached from the everyday world that simply reading it is a challenge.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhere between life and death there is life!
Review: This book kept me in a trance for the two hours it took me to read it. I, unlike previous reviewers came away Euphoric. The Author, Don DeLillo, takes you on a journey into the mind of a wife reliving what she thought was just another uneventful morning she had with her husband.

You have to pay attention, otherwise you miss the point that everyone goes about their daily lives in a kind of mindless way until something shocking happens. In this case it's the death of Lauren's husband and she replays over and over again their last conversation and all the mundane things that happen all around them like toasting bread and watching birds feeding outside the kitchen window.

To me, the Author's point was that you take for granted that someone you love will always be there until by some unfortunate event they are yanked away and you are left with recreating the short time you had together.

Just as suddenly as Rey, Lauren's husband is pulled out of the story, a strange man is discovered in the house. It's left up to the readers imagination to figure out whether the man is real, a ghost, an imaginery friend or even an alien. Without revealing too much, Lauren loses herself to the task of discovering why the man is there in the house with her and in doing so unknowingly examines her own life.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious
Review: Sometimes I thnk the more determinedly tedious and ambiguous an author, the more some fools rush to proclaim what lovely raiments the emporer sports.

Dental work, a bad sitcom, even wrestling would have been more interesting that the short time it took to read this bit of trash. Nothing is delivered. Nothing.

Rating:
Summary: After the deluge, the weird calm
Review: This being a review of the audiobook version of the novel, I'm going to praise both DeLillo's writing and somebody's inspired choice of Laurie Anderson to read the book. But first, the words.

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I didn't much like Underworld. For me, one of DeLillo's greatest talents is his quite uncanny ear for American dialogue. I think that his art is at its finest when it's investigating silences, ellipses, gaps, beneath the frantic public/private hum of American realities. (He is one of the very, very few contemporary novelists in any language who also writes good plays.) Underworld seemed to me too sprawling, too obviously grab-all and catch-all. The Body Artist I read in a single evening and came away from changed. It's one of the finest, most beautiful distillations of the blank mystery in American life that DeLillo has ever done. It has as much felt reality as White Noise or Libra, but the nature of the experience is still so strange as to make it a book we could hardly expect from a writer who's just finished something as sprawlingly There as Underworld. Lauren is utterly believable, to the point where you wonder if you haven't read something about her work in some back issue of October or Artforum somewhere - and yet she is a creation.

So it needs to be said that the choice of Laurie Anderson as a reader of the audiobook is both a good joke and a brilliant decision. Anderson's cool, slightly lispy voice is not as trained as we expect from Audiobook readers (actors, most of 'em) but it is perfectly pitched to the careful, slightly slangy, reflective tone of DeLillo's prose. The occasional phrase slips by obscurely (you realise how much DeLillo's writing needs to go straight from the page into the ear - having it read sort of slurs it a bit) but she does a beautiful job. This is just the CD to take on a long train journey, given a reasonably quiet train and a couple of hours off to eat and think a bit. And the same goes for the book.

I trust that there are more books in DeLillo. He isn't an old fart yet, not by a long way. But this one displays his essentially rather weird talent more nakedly than any other for a long time. He remains one of America's finest and most subliminally alarming writers. His best stuff haunts you like nobody else - or not since Paul Auster gave up the attempt to be anything more than a sort of sub-Joel Chandler Harris, anyway.

Rating:
Summary: Wow-what a story, what a recording
Review: Laurie Anderson's reading of this novel completely immersed me in the story. Having listened to the story, I can't imagine actually reading it (and I read alot!). The main character, Laura, spends much of the book in introspection on time, life, death. Ms. Anderson's fabulous story- telling voices add to the breathless, uncertain quality of Laura's musings.
This reading is a MUST for any Laurie Anderson fan, but would also add to the library of DiLuillo fans.

Rating:
Summary: A Single-Sitting Masterpiece
Review: You just gotta love the way DeLillo returned to the world of fiction after the gargantuan epic "Underworld" with this sparse, minimalistic novella. Gotta love it! Aside from the boldness of this move, I found "The Body Artist" to be very interesting and well worth the two or three hours it took to read it. I think it is a bold step forward (or backwards?) for DeLillo and would like to see more contemporary authors give up their "Ulysses" aspirations for a book or two and tackle a novella. At this point, it seems to me that DeLillo can do no wrong.

Rating:
Summary: starkly poetic
Review: It would be a mistake to dismiss this novella as a trifle.

It's harmless to accuse DeLillo of writing for his own sake, or for the sake of the book, or for not caring so much about his audience. It's a potentially interesting criticism if it is properly considered. If anything, it would lead to a greater appreciation of the landscape he has been exploring for nearly 30 years.

Here's the thing: His intent is not all that crucial to this particular piece of art. Even if the book is considered at its simplest, even if all you see when you read it is a curious story of an odd woman, her dead husband, and a character that occupies her (if not her house, than her mind), it is a success.

When it's best, however, it's a neatly confined canvas that manages a sprawl of intricate space. There's a hell of an essay to be written about The Body Artist and Underworld; about the self, the character, the world of loss. I'm no lit crit crazy boy, I haven't the energy to submerge myself in it any longer, but why bother reading interesting writers if all you've got to offer are easy criticisms.