I read some reviews on Amazon.com before I picked this book to read. Some of the reviews for Don Delillo’s The Body Artist said:
[It] is simply a rare escapade into the world of literary realism. There is so much harmony in this book that it I found it difficult to disassociate myself from the hypnotic force of its words.
Some may dismiss “The Body Artist” as a minor work after DeLillo’s sprawling masterpiece “Underworld.” In heft, this is a lighter work, an easy evening read. But in style and subject, DeLillo breaks new ground with this novel and achieves surprising poignancy.
It sounded promising.
What I seemed to have looked past, however, are the reviews that more accurately describe my feelings of the novel:
The Body Artist is a very thin story written in dense, wandering thoughts. DeLillo’s craftsmanship with prose is a redeemable quality, but due to my lack of interest in the characters or plot, it won’t linger.
There it was, my entire opinion of the book summed up in two sentences, put far more eloquently than I could ever state. The bottom line was that I had no emotional investment in anyone involved.
The first eighteen pages are about the main character and her husband eating breakfast. That, I didn’t mind so much. It kept me intrigued, and I figured that if the rest of the book was like that, I’d be okay. I had high expectations going into the second chapter.
The rest of the book involves two characters, one being the wife (the title character, she’s a contortionist or something of that nature), and this random, emotionless man who she happens to stumble upon. He has no name and no personality to speak of, and I can’t bring myself to want to read anymore about him past the initial physical description. And when you don’t care about half the people in the book, it drags by slowly. Lauren, the other main character, seems to waste her life away in the brief amount of time covered in the book. Her thoughts are repetitive, and while they’re interesting and thought-provoking the first time, they’re simply redundant after the third or fourth.
I’ll give DeLillo credit in that the prose is beautiful, he’s clearly a talented writer and I’ll be giving him another shot. The plot just seemed arbitrary and in an attempt to be artsy became too disconnected to be enjoyable. It seemed to take forever to get through, and the entire book clocks in at only 128 pages. I’m not sure I could have gotten through it had it been any longer.
I’m not one to abandon a book halfway through. If I’ve started it I’ll finish it unless it’s too horrible to go on. This wasn’t the case, I won’t give The Body Artist a failing grade, but it won’t be on the list of books I reread, and it won’t be on the list of books I recommend to anyone else.
