The Body Artist

The Body Artist, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is one of his shortest and strangest — a combination literary drama and ghost story, involving a widowed young performance artist. DeLillo still has great observational powers though:

It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not.