Rating: 
Summary: A Poltergeist in Tight Whites
Review: DeLillo should be ashamed of himself. One gets the feeling, reading this book, that DeLillo halfheartedly penned this story in response to a writing assignment from a college professor - double spacing the lines and using an extra large font and widened margins in order to meet the 100 page minimum. The dialogue between the protagonist, Lauren Hartke, and the "mysterious" man who suddenly appears in her bedroom one day wearing nothing but his Fruit-of-the-Looms, is not in the least bit insightful or thought provoking...it's just plain stupid. Don't be deceived by the literary pundits who extrapolate great meaning and depth to this book: The emperor has no clothes (just some soiled undergarments).
Rating: 
Summary: A Weird Page Turner!
Review: A movie director commits suicide. His wife, a performance artist, copes with his loss by unconsciously generating an impaired housemate, whose awareness suggests he floats in time. Gradually, the wife merges with this figment, using it to force her way into a timeless consciousness, where she might float in and out of the past and still have the presence of her husband. Basically, "The Body Artist" tells the story of this woman, who becomes totally weird and reaches a state in which she thinks she can edge around death. Folks, it's fascinating!As always with a DeLillo book, there is superb writing and imagery that is both familiar and bleak. Here's a fragment that I liked: "She saw a twirling leaf just outside the window. It was a small amber leaf twirling in the air beneath a tree branch that extended over the roof. There was no sign of a larva web from which the leaf might be suspended, or a strand of some bird's nest-building material. Just the leaf in midair, turning."
Rating: 
Summary: What could possibly follow Underworld but this?
Review: The Body Artist is the story of a woman, a body artist who finds herself "alone by the sea", grieving the suicide of her husband in the company only of a ghost-like figure who inhabits the farmhouse they shared for the summer. This quiet novella, a departure for DeLillo, is concerned not with the sweeping history or matrices of reference of Underworld or White Noise, but with something altogether more personal. And what else but an understated, intimate fiction could follow Underworld? If, as DeLillo says, he writes "to see how much he knows", perhaps this time he is seeing how much he knows about another way of writing. It is great to see a writer of DeLillo's stature patronize the novella form, in the main neglected by publishers, but the effect is not wholly convincing. As is bound to happen if DeLillo sits at a type-writer for any given period, there is brilliance, but DeLillo's brilliance is not the well-spring of this novella so much as flourishes in an otherwise masterfully domesticated work. DeLillo's writing is graceful and exhibits his characteristic insouciance with syntax "There were voices on the radio in like Hindi it sounded" as well as his gob-smacking lyrical gift "still a little puddled in dream-melt". The erotic passages are beautiful and the novella is spare and ethereal in the tradition of writers like Yasunari Kawabata; an internet image of a deserted road in Finland, grief, a ghost, what the narrator calls "floating poetry." DeLillo abandons reference for lyricism with rich effect, but even if you get past the flaws in the book; sometimes overwrought rhetorical questions, the fact that body-based performance art has to be the most tedious form in the universe, this is no more than a gently satisfying story and, in the context of DeLillo's eleven preceding novels, a tantalizing place holder for brilliance to come.
Rating: 
Summary: An epic novella
Review: Don De Lillo has a knack for knockout beginnings. He wrote one of the best for his last novel, "Underworld," centering around a legendary baseball game (1951's "Shot Heard Around the World" game). In "The Body Artist", the novella begins with a morning spent between a couple -- the body artist Lauren and her husband, Rey Robles, a film director. The couple converse over orange juice and toast, demonstrating the quirks and cues of language, behavior, and the senses. De Lillo's scope is not scenically epic, but his writing remains profoundly conceived and displayed. ****Despite the spotlight start, the reader will probably find the rest of the book to be ponderous and even boring. The next time we see Lauren, she is dealing with the absence of her husband and begins a relationship with a stranger who seems ageless, nameless, and detached from language and meaning. All the signifiers of taste, color, sight, and sound in the book's opening sequence are unraveled. Readers looking for plot and pacing will be frustrated. ****But if we suppress expectations and just consider De Lillo's mindscape, the novella works. "The Body Artist" questions how we register the world around us and the people in it. (What gives their true essence? Does language have real meaning?) We can recreate what someone says and even the tone and gestures they use to emphasize their words, but the original person is elusive. Meaning, therefore, must be personal and illogical to the material and linguistic worlds. And as De Lillo writes, "You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness." There is no trail leading to that clarity. And yet, it is the absolute truth.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanted to like this book- but I didn't.
Review: First of all, I bought the audio cassette and I thought the reading by Laurie Anderson was very good (in contrast to the reading of Underworld, which I thought was horrible). However, I liked Underworld. (By the way, ... does not tell you who is reading the casssette, which I think is relevant information). There were parts of Body Artist which were remarkable, as other reviewers have mentioned. Delillo really is very good at conversations and how people think as they go about their lives. In this book, though, there was nothing else that I could relate to. I did not like any of the characters at all, and there was nothing in any of their behavior that I was sympathetic to. I kept listening only to see what would happen at the end, there was no particular story to follow. Perhaps Don Delillo did not intend the book to be thought of in this way, perhaps he wanted it to be an examination of different ways of perceiving time and whatever, I don't know, since I didn't get it.
Rating:
Summary: Not Quite Vintage DeLillo
Review: The book jacket to this novel has one thing right, it is spare. I'm just not sure if it is seductive, like the jacket also suggests. The Body Artist is very DeLillo. How the sentences are constructed, how paragraphs flow, DeLillo gives off a sense of himself as a writer. Yet, for all DeLillo's greatness as a writer, something is missing in this novel. Some say plot is missing, but that is not fair. DeLillo does not use plot in the conventional sense. If one looks for a conventional plot in Underworld, it isn't there. On page 65, DeLillo both describes part of a truth about postmodern literature, and also what seems to be ailing this novel: "There is a code in the simplist conversation that tells the speakers what's going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked. There was a missing beat. It was hard for her to find the tempo. All they had were unadjusted words. She lost touch with him, lost interest sometimes, couldn't locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums, the audible pauses that pace a remark....all this was missing here" (65-66). Despite this absence, I look forward to anything DeLillo writes in the future. When the man is on top of his game, his novels work and draw the reader in to a whole new world. Sadly, in the Body Artist, the reader is left wondering where the world is, and what happened.
Rating:
Summary: Ack! Don't be misled by the DeLillo groupies!
Review: I've yet to read a positive review of this novel that can intelligently explain why it is so "wonderful." I'm tired of all the sycophantic nonsense about DeLillo's wonderful sentences, about his living in the skin of our times, about his teaching us to read. Blah blah blah -- just empty hero worship! For the love of whomever, talk about the book! That said, this book is a rather cliched short story masquerading as a novel. It purports to explore the threadbare themes of language and time -- how the two are linked, the inadaquacies of each, the different ways they might be experienced. Fine enough, only the affair becomes little more than a ghost story (or IS it???) with the predictably ambiguous treatment of the relevant characters one expects from a ghost story pretending to be oh-so-much more than a ghost story. This "novel" is a literary hiccup, a belch, a fart in the dark. DeLillo is a fine writer and all that, but PLEASE! He would have been better off publishing his grocery list than parading this dull collection of "delightful sentences."
Rating:
Summary: DeLillo, the Shoddy Economist
Review: What are DeLillo, his agent, editor, and publisher thinking? DeLillo's Underworld, was a magnificent effort that ran some 800 to 900 pages, its plots engrossed us, and its many characters seared themselves onto our memories. Fans who waited for his next novel spent three years wondering what it would be like. Here is the answer. Don DeLillo's newest The Body Artist is a short story occupying 124 ittsy-bittsy pages slapped between hard covers, with a mediocre dust jacket, no plot, and a cast of characters that could fit onto a postage stamp. A review in Sunday's The New York Times praises the book's careful choice of words, and recommends savoring them slowly. Let us examine that. Looking at a random page in the book, we find a paragraph consisting of four consecutive sentences, three of which start with She. That is a no-no in writing school - I. Throughout, the wording is slipshod, unable to stand up to a detailed examination. Construction is such that if this was a manuscript submitted by a new writer, it would not make it past the mail carrier! This publication looks like a first draft for a scrapped novel. It is in no condition to leave anyone's word processor. If anyone actually edited The Body Artist, they should return to their previous occupation writing advertisements selling used coffins. It draws attention to itself through contorted construction that, as this book is by DeLillo, may provoke long discussions. Reading it is akin to experiencing real life, as against undergoing the vicarious situations within a conventional novel. For example, it opens with a mundane scene in Lauren Hawke's kitchen, describing an everyday boring morning. Offering details of such a scene is not fiction writing. It is documentary writing. True, we learn some more about her at the end of the book, but writing the book backward does not advance the art of the novel. Lauren lives alone in a rented house on a barren seacoast, where a miasmatic atmosphere --it engulfs the surroundings -- surfaces early in the story. This house is quietly sinister - like the one in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Lauren hears a noise and discovers a spectre living upstairs. It is male, and talks like her own sub-conscious might. It can regurgitate convoluted words that are echoes of conversations she held with her film-director husband Rey Robles; he died a suicide. That is all there is to the book. Readers must themselves concoct the remaining 226 pages that would make for a reasonable-length novel. If you must read it, slip into a bookstore, pick it up, read it during one or two lunch breaks. Doing so exhibits a less Cavalier attitude than do DeLillo and his publisher.
Rating:
Summary: god what a boring book
Review: this book was a real bummer that i wish i had not read. good that it was short though.
Rating:
Summary: Distilled DeLillo
Review: This is a pure distillation of DeLillo. The difficulty of communication, the struggle to connect, and the overwhelming primacy of language. If you want an introduction to DeLillo's major themes, this is the place to look. Although some have complained about how short this book is, there is an excellent reason for it: I doubt you could take any more. This is a literary chocolate torte. Dense and rich to the extreme, you simply can't eat a very big slice. It will overwhelm you, and make you sick. The most shocking thing about this novel is that I don't feel that there is a single word that wasn't chosen with deliberate care. There's a section that describes the writing perfectly: "But this was the effect he had, shadow-inching through a sentence, showing a word in its facets and aspects, words like moons in particular phases." Overall, this is a new masterpiece from DeLillo. What more needs to be said?
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