This was a tough one to rate. It is my first time reading DeLillo, and I confess that this does make me want to read him more, despite my low rating. His writing is beautiful, built of rhythms and allusions, foreshadowings and call-backs. So why did I rate it so low? 
 From the start there was something in the speech patterns of the characters that annoyed me. Almost every sentence is fragmentary, unfinished. Yes, people speak like this often, but not constantly. At first I thought DeLillo was going for this sort of stilted realism, even though to me it sounded stagey and fake, like an amateur dramatic performance of a Pinter play. In retrospect, though, this style fits in with the style of the rest of the book. Everything about the book hints at more going on than is foregrounded - as should be the case with literature, of course; that is one of the things that raises it above 'ordinary' fiction - but I have no idea what. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; ambiguity can be a wonderful tool and I had decided when I finished this book that if the ambiguity stayed with me and made me think and question what I had read I would go back and up my rating, but it hasn't. I won't say that it is a novel about nothing - it is about loss, obviously, and communication (or the problem of it) and, no doubt, other things, but it seemed to me a fairly empty exercise. One thing that seemed appropriate was the description of Lauren's performance as the titular Body Artist. It seemed like one of those avant-garde pieces of performance art that certain cultured people coo over and pretend they see profound meaning in, but is really vapid and pretentious, which seemed a nice parallel for the book itself.