The Smell Collector by David Hill Burns

Jim Bronson is thirty-five-years-old. He lives with his mother. He works at the public library because it’s next to the post office, and the post office won’t hire him. Jim has devoted his entire life to “collecting” smells, as he refers to it, and taking care of his aging mother. He’s never kissed a woman other than his mother. He believes that the love of his life is a little girl who he encountered at a post office when he was a little boy. He spends his free time roaming the city, visiting smells that are of interest to him, or in a small laboratory in his mother’s basement recreating smells or simulating smells he hopes to one day experience.

He cares little for people, except for Mother and his would-be childhood sweetheart...until he meets Marie, a woman with an irresistible scent.