Rating: 
Summary: The Mind Artist
Review: Well, this is certainly a quiet story, a marked contrast to earlier DeLillo books in which his particular brand of detachment stood in contrast to the extraordinary events that make up his plots. Although the protagonist here is a woman who expresses herself with her body, The Body Artist is a book of the mind: it's all interiors as she copes with the suicide of her husband. She is either alone in their country house, or not alone - her foil is a sort of idiot man-child who can barely express himself, and as often as not talks in mimicry (of the body artist, of her dead husband). He seems like a being made up of reflections. But then, so does she, in a way. It's an interesting meditation, but it's all kind of fleeting, and somehow, to me, a bit soulless. The final impression is of a bad European art film (or piece of performance art) in which an attempt is made to make ideas seem large by lingering on them. But the ideas really aren't that large at all. They don't hold up well under the weight of the language. It's an interesting book, but not one that's likely to linger as one of DeLillo's more important offerings.
Rating: 
Summary: So Quiet You Can Almost Hear The Ticking Of The Clock
Review: Lauren Hartke sits at the kitchen table and looks out at birds in her feeder...coffee steams from a cup. She speaks in quiet tones to her husband--a husband who has had other wives, a husband married later in life--a husband who is about to remove himself from existence.Ostensibly this work is about loss. Don DeLillo becomes Lauren, first person, the body artist. The body artist who, we later learn, has chameleon-like abilities, but for the time being one who merely communes with a presence--perhaps the residue of a dead husband, perhaps a real being. Lauren, in quiet contemplation, wrestles with the meaning of this vague presence, a being difficult to know--a being not capable of cooperation or revelation. This novel is so quietly intelligent you can almost hear the ticking of the clock as the birds whir in and out of sunlight. I highly recommend this work, which I believe moves DeLillo to a higher plateau of literary achievement.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't start here with DeLillo
Review: Short and slight. Read "End Zone", "White Noise" or "Libra" and you'll understand why DeLillo is highly rated. Read this and you'll wonder what the fuss was about.
Rating:
Summary: Dellilo Extraordinaire!
Review: While I would say I am a fan of Dellilo's work, I would not classify myself as an afficionado. Of his twelve novels, this is the 5th one I have read. However, in comparison to the other 4, this one showed a degree of advancement and growth in Dellilo's writing style that heretofore just did not exist. In "The Body Artist" Dellilo manages in a short 123 pages, to get across the most intense and complex images of life after death of a loved spouse in a most unusual setting. The book often felt 'Barthelme-like' in its use of phrases and descriptive clauses to create vivid imagery of mental processes. In a complete reversal from what was almost unbearable verbosity in "Underworld", in this book, Dellilo delivers thousands of pages of information in just a short book, which could almost be called a Novella, except for the power of the message conveyed by Dellilo. While I hesitate to give this book a full 5 star rating, I would say that the book is the first one of Dellilo's efforts that is truly on at least the edge of true literature. I highly recommend it!
Rating: 
Summary: Deceptively thin, remarkably full
Review: I love Don DeLillo's style. I think he has one of the most unique and refined voices in contemporary American letters. Not refined in the sense of high society, but polished, honed, razor-edged. He doesn't miss a thing and carries you from page to page, less in search of the next plot twist, than in search of another magnificent thread of language and insight. Bach wrote scores of Fugues that exemplify structure and form, but I don't find them particularly expressive. Miles Davis exemplifies expression, but (and I know die hard Davis fans will argue with me on this) the piece's structure is less important than his sound. Of course fugues and blues riffs have both expression and structure, but they make choices of which to emphasize and which to relax. "The Body Artist" is definitely more Miles than Bach, more Jazz than Baroque. It is only 124 pages long, but it drips with remarkably powerful prose. Just take a look at how craftily he conveys the difficulty of communication He knew what a chair is called and a window and a wall but not the tape recorder... "If there is another language you speak," she told him, "say some words." "Say some words." "Say some words. Doesn't matter if I can't understand" "Say some words to say some words." "All right. Be a zen master, you little creep..." This reads like Gertrude Stein for the 21st century. I do not believe this character was supposed to be real. He seemed to me a projection of Lauren's grief and confusion and curiosity. I would go so far as to say that this book serves a similar purpose for its author. It is the most introspective and patiently exploratory piece I have seen from DeLillo. He takes on some extremely complicated ideas, ideas that cannot be expressed in words, paradoxes that can never be understood and in a wonderfully human way, offers a glimpse into these ideas. "But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence." Rather than wander around from one fragmented character to another, slowly creating a whole, he sticks with one fragmented character and her alter ego. The result is a beautiful tapestry of consciousness (both individual and universal), psychical exploration, and healing. To criticize this book because it is small is just about the stupidest criterion for art and expression. Anyone who has read the imagist Modern poets knows that sometimes language needs to be pared back to its most essential components in order to get at the truth (and isn't that the point of art in the first place?). The Modernists needed to do that after a verbose Victorian age saturated page after page of pointless prose. In our age of information overload, perhaps we could use a dose of the same. DeLillo seems to think so and I think he's right.
Rating:
Summary: Familiar post modern themes but a delight.
Review: Existential angst at its best, Dellilo's THE BODY ARTIST explores the human condition: being-in-the-world, identity, time passing and defining oneself in terms of the 'other'. These are fashionable post modern concerns that have been discussed for the last thirty years. The novel is an excellent medium in which to explore these ideas, and the author has done a wonderful job. Always pushing the use of language, Dellilo's prose is a pleasure to read. One can see the immense thought put into every sentence, paragraph and page. I wanted to avoid the adjective -haunting - but this particular word adequetly describes THE BODY ARTIST. I recommend this book to anyone who is serious about literature. Excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling
Review: When I first started reading this book,I almost gave up on it,thinking it was moving too slowly,and that time was stretched to unnatural limits. Then, it occured to me that this was exactly the author's intent. Getting back to the reading,I couldnt put the book down. This was the first book by this author's that I have read,and to my delight it is a work of genious. I wont describe the plot,since other reviewers already have,and that would be tedious,but I must say that this book grips you,and chills you to the bone,in such a subtle manner,that it is nothing short of a beautiful tapestry of a work. The plot though simplified becomes haunting because the language is laid bare with a distinct love of words,the sounds they make,and the spaces they occupy. Thanks for a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Good grief.
Review: It is no accident that DeLillo's first word in this book is "time." "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance a spider pressed to its web." And so you enter "The Body Artist," DeLillo's latest work that is apparently being written off in a number of quarters as being too slight. But as you can tell from just two sentences, he still has all the visionary skills of the writer he ever had, and he is addressing the "big" concepts, just as he has done in the previous works of his that I've read. Okay, so this is not "Underworld." Let that be understood. "The Body Artist" does not attempt to achieve the overarching historical and societal commentary of that opus, but that does not mean that it carries no weight. Here DeLillo is delving into the personal, even more so than in portions of "Mao II." How does a human being respond to the pressures of time, of memory, of grieving, of silence, of being alive? Other reviewers have laid out the plot for you. Man dies. Wife grieves. A stranger shows up, then leaves. The wife, the body artist, performs a piece based on this. That's the bones on which the tale is built. But the fascination is not the plot but the personalities, the psychology of the heroine, the boundaries of what is real and what is not. And this is the stuff of "big" books, not lightweight ones. It's more like the thin volumes that Beckett was putting out in his later stages than the tomes released by Proust, but like both of those writers, DeLillo is not focused on minor concepts here even if he is delimiting his world by the circumstances surrounding one woman for a brief time. And through it all runs the subtext of What is creation? How does it work? Where does the artist establish or violate the boundaries of real life and art? At what point do they blur? Why? Writers have been dealing with this in ways for centuries, and coming down on opposite sides of the fence. DeLillo puts his two cents in on these questions without being heavy-handed about it. What are we to conclude about the body artist who projects herself into the newspaper stories she reads? Could she be projecting a strange unreal man into the realities of her life immediately after the death of her husband? Well, pick up this book and be the judge for yourself. DeLillo won't answer the question for you, but it's well worth the evening that you spend with it. You may find the urge to immediately reread, as I did.
Rating:
Summary: Sour Grapes
Review: My girlfriend went shopping and bought grapes which she left in the fridge for me for when I got home from work, knowing that I like grapes that have been left in the fridge for an hour or two. It pleased me, her doing that and knowing that. I took the grapes into the living room, thinking I'd eat them while I read the DeLillo (because it's pleasant combining joys, when you can). It occurred to me that there were more grapes than pages, but still. The opening pages were as fresh as the grape circumference splitting against the roof of my mouth, cold juice. The wife and the husband in the kitchen eating breakfast. The clumsy muddle of details. Food and radios and movement and things said and unsaid. (Also, already, the peculiarity of the dialogue read alongside the incisive, surreal prose - the way the dialogue alienates you in its unreality, the way the prose seduces you.) The story - what story there is - goes like this. A woman, Lauren Hartke, loses her husband. Or rather is deprived of her husband, who takes his life in his first wife's apartment in New York. He was a film director. She is a body artist. Those words, the words of the title, are unusual. You ask yourself precisely what that is - a body artist. There is a coolness in that phrase, a detachment from the physicality of life. Lauren is an observer, not a participant. Or so it feels to me. (Which reminds me again of the effect of the - bad? no, it couldn't be - dialogue and the wonderful writing. That breakfast scene again. The husband, Rey Robles, eats a fig, spreads it on toast, "spread it with the bottom of the spoon, blood-buttery swirls that popped with seedlife.") Left alone, Lauren becomes abstract. The whole novel, what there is of it, becomes abstract. We're in a Klara Sax painting. Or a clumsy sculpture. That clumsy word again. She discovers a man. What could be a man. She calls him Mr Tuttles. He has been living in her home. We don't know where or how. She cannot tell. He is not always around. He is strange and otherworldly. He is the monster that appears at the edge of the bed in that Stephen King book, "Gerald's Game." Only he isn't a monster. He is a cartoon. He can imitate her husband. She is drawn to this, drawn to the cartoon man as a way through grief. You don't know if the man is real or in her head. You sort of feel this is grief, a manifestation of dealing with something larger than yourself. Lauren is Catherine Deneuve in "Belle de Jour". Lauren is Catherine Deneuve in that Roman Polanski film. Whatever it was called. "Repulsion." Lauren produces a piece of work. She is a body artist, after all. Her aim, she says is to "Make a still life that's living, not painted." Which is what we have here. In a way. An abstract still life that doesn't admit a single meaning (because it does not admit itself). The woman interviewing Hartke says "Her art in this piece is obscure, slow, difficult and sometimes agonizing . . . It is about who we are when we are not rehearsing who we are." Why I mentioned the grapes here, why I felt they were important to this - for you: the grapes were a simple, pure, unadulterated joy. The DeLillo was not. (Nor, perhaps, should it be.) But it should offer itself up. It shouldn't hide. There should be a clarity, a hygiene, of perception that the book lacks. It's another example (like - blasphemy, I know, but - "Underworld") of DeLillo seeking to find a way of expressing something difficult and almost but not quite making it. There is never any doubting the writing. The doubt is only ever with what the writing is trying to say. Obscure, slow and difficult. There are elements of a horror story here. It would be creepy if it wasn't so - ineffectual. There is a little bad weather, one morning towards the end of the book. "The fog was somber and bronzed low-rolling toward the coast but then lost form on landfall, taking everything with it in amoebic murk." The amoebic murk is the thing. The details that require precision, the desire to know more, is lost in the amoebic murk. The grapes were sharp, sweet, easy and beautiful. The DeLillo was muddy and disappointing. There were more grapes in the bag than pages in the book. There was more (what? more of that thing that makes life exciting, more of that thing that can't be reduced to a word or a phrase or a sentence, more of that stuff that great novels do so well) in the grapes.
Rating:
Summary: Don Delillo Fan Club, Rah!Rah!
Review: The two reviews below me are garbage; so is the review from the kid from Boston; destroy and forget them. The effect of this book is chilling, and though it is as cerebral as anything Delillo's done, it's much more intimate. Global events and the interlacings of society are completely absent. This alone makes this book strange in comparison with Delillo's other stuff. The first chapter is honestly a perfect chapter; every sentence seems perfectly in place, perfectly cut. What unravels is the protean nature of the senses and the act of sensing; the inability to fully see and comprehend a given moment in its entirety; how light and airy living can be when you often don't feel like acting until the possibility of acting is gone, and can't fully understand something until that something is no longer there to be understood. Well, that last paragraph basically doesn't make sense, but Delillo makes it all ring with crystal-clear sense in this book. This book will make you feel uncomfortable in your own skin, will give you a headache and cause you to doubt the most basic assumptions and paradigms you have about the world percieved through the senses.
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