The Body Artist opens with a breakfast scene in a rambling rented house somewhere on the New England coast. We meet Lauren Hartke, the Body Artist of the title, and her husband Rey Robles, a much older, thrice-married director. Through their delicate, intimate, half-complete thoughts and words DeLillo proves himself a stunningly unsentimental observer of marriage, and of the idiosyncrasies that both isolate and bind us.

Rey says he's taking a drive and he does, all the way to the Manhattan apartment of his first wife, where he shoots himself. Lauren is left alone, or so she thinks. She is soon to discover, however, that there is a stranger in the house. An eerily gifted individual who often speaks in Rey's voice or in her own, who knows both intimate moments of their past life and things that haven't yet happened.

A lean, sad, beautiful novel, The Body Artist is pure DeLillo.