A strange, psychological story about grief, and coping with the trauma of sudden loss. A fine morning nothing out of the ordinary, and a husband who drove out to his first wife's place and put a bullet through his mouth. The wife, the body artist, returns to the rented house where they spent their last days together and discovers she is not alone in the house. Has her husband "returned" in the voice of the young mentally-challenged man who has, seemingly, been occupying some hidden part of the house? Or is it merely her loneliness and imagination, and another expression of her grief the reality of which she renders effectively in artistic body performance?

This is the plot, simple and streamlined, but there is something profound and mysterious in it that makes this novella a quite interesting read. ( )

Suicide, or more to the point - the awful aftermath of suicide; the grief of the loved ones (in this case, the widow) left behind - would be a pretty tough sell for most works of fiction. Too depressing. Too damn real. But not in Don DeLillo's sage-like hands. He sells the devastation wrought by suicide beautifully and tenderly in The Body Artist: an existential study of time and our relationship to time as we travel through it, conveyed along for us in the imaginings (i.e., is the little miming man discovered in the third floor bedroom real or unreal?) of Lauren Hartke, and in her introspections; that is, in her deep loss and deeper longings, and ultimately in the transformative power of her body art sculpted from the raw pain and suffering she endures as a recent, bewildered widow.

I don't know how DeLillo does it. I feel ill-equipped describing his precise way with words. I've revised this section of the review at least ten times, knowing I'm not getting it right. I almost give up. And it's the cadence of Delillo's language too, not just the words, imbuing the words with deeper meaning. David Foster Wallace once wrote that Delillo's writing "just clicks". Expanding on that premise then, Delillo's like a metronome, hypnotic almost (but definitely not predictable despite the constant "clicking" and rhythm), and in The Body Artist, he's tapped into, and kept exquisite time with, the metaphysical. The Body Artist becomes therefore, as much a work of philosophy as it is a work of fiction.

What Delillo does with language evokes in me the same response I get when listening to a powerful piece of classical music: Goosebumps gallore, awe, wonder, inspiration and veneration. There's something sublime going on here in his writing that I can't quite name. So I'll just call it Art.

Yes, that's what I'm driving at: in The Body Artist, Delillo has managed to translate the secret languages of the Mysterious or Metaphysical; using the internal monologues and musings of Lauren Hartke as his mouthpiece, and making his philosophical abstractions as palpable as the pages his heady language is printed on.

That Delillo's prose is unplugged in The Body Artist, acoustic, if you will, set on a simple Starbuck's stage - a one act play with few characters - proves that he can stir the soul even when his aims aren't as huge-venued or symphonic as they were in his previous, vast novel, Underworld.

I'd say I enjoyed The Body Artist even more than Underworld, and even more, too, than his award winning, postmodern masterpiece, White Noise.

What is a 'body artist'? To reveal that here might destroy the subtle surprise, and it's a tiny book to begin with, a novella really, full of surprises. Before I read the book I lamely believed 'body artist' meant something regarding...tattoos. What-ever! In fact, I even tagged the book, when I first input it, with: 'tattoos,' since I've got me a tattoo or two and obviously like tattoos. I've since deleted that tag - 'tattoos' - from The Body Artist. I sure hope nobody noticed. Because body art and The Body Artist are definitely not necessarily synonymous. ( )

Beautiful and mystifying riff on language, loss and time. ( )

It is a short book (124 pages). I love his writing. I
didn't care for this story much though. There was too much unexplained
weirdness, stuff that defied the laws of physics. Some people love this stuff,
but perhaps as a scientist I at least want a plausible explanation. (Note: I did
enjoy the Time Traveller's Wife). Also, Lauren was not a believable female
character, which is so common among male writers. The sexual stuff would just
not ever happen that way and reeked of male perspective and terminology (I found
The Time Traveller's Wife to be similar in this regard-- even though written by a woman). Her whole phychology
was just not real to me. There are some beautifully written passages but to
make the story work there would just have to be more of it. Too many open ends
for me.
Rating: 3.0 ( )

This book had some interesting ideas but I did not find it disturbing enough for the main conceit to really work on me. My favorite part of the book was the final pages when the performance was described, those images had real power. ( )