book review mouth to mouth

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In ‘Mouth to Mouth,’ a Tom Ripley-like storyteller spins a mesmerizing yarn

The unnamed narrator of Antoine Wilson’s “ Mouth to Mouth ” doesn’t spend much time talking about himself. In the rush of the novel’s opening pages, he lets on that he is a middle-aged father of two, an alumnus of UCLA, a little-known author with possible cult status in Germany and stuck in the purgatory of JFK airport awaiting a delayed flight. What else? He’s traveling alone, hasn’t touched alcohol in eight years and is “taking a much-needed break from family obligations.”

At least he was. The story the man is telling took place at some point in the past — Wilson suggests 2010 — and holds within it yet another incident that occurred about 20 years earlier. That second story isn’t even about him. It concerns Jeff Cook, a former classmate the man barely knew but who, he admits, “was one of those minor players from the past who claimed for himself an outsize role in my memories.”

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By chance, he and Cook are booked on the same flight to Frankfurt. After some small talk, Cook invites the man to wait out the delay with him in the first-class lounge. “Everything about him conveyed neatness and taste,” the writer, conscious of his “scuffed sneakers” and “scruffy backpack,” says of Cook, who at UCLA resembled “a sort of thrift-store Adonis” with “cascading hair” and “high, broad cheekbones.” More chitchat follows, the two exchange a couple of faded college memories, and then, with obvious calculation, Cook launches into the story — a confession, really — that will dominate the remainder of the men’s time in airport limbo as well as this brisk novel’s 65 chapters, some covering no more than a page.

If all that makes “Mouth to Mouth” sound a bit traditional, then good. It is, and refreshingly so. Like his characters, Wilson is a first-rate yarn spinner. Cook’s Tom Ripley-like story — and the wary narrator’s retelling of it — is loaded with fateful encounters, hidden agendas, shrouded identities, adulterous betrayals and brushes with death.

Wilson has been here before. His debut novel, “ The Interloper ,” is a solid, if sometimes predictable, first-person recollection of a revenge plot that went horribly south. That book’s follow-up, “ Panorama City ,” is terrific — a deathbed chronicle from an eccentric man-child who, in the end, discovers he isn’t dying, after all. In both novels, the narrators are acutely aware of their preposterousness. They question their memories and motives, and understand that by sharing their stories, they are relinquishing ownership of them. “I just want you to keep in mind that what we see, what we think we see, I should say, is always changed by the words in our heads,” the narrator of “Panorama City” says in a message to his unborn son.

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Cook, too, is aware that his story may be hard for his audience to believe, particularly because he admits to having never shared it with anyone before. Insisting that his former classmate’s “appearing out of nowhere must have sparked some old circuitry” in his brain, Cook recounts how, in his early 20s, he brought a drowned man back to life on Santa Monica beach. His initial curiosity about the man he rescued — a Beverly Hills art dealer named Francis Arsenault — gives way to parasitic obsession.

“I didn’t think I’d saved a saint,” Cook says, “I hadn’t expected to, everyone has their flaws. I wanted him to be good, though, I wanted to feel that I had done a good thing not only for him but for all the people he came in contact with.”

Cook infiltrates Arsenault’s personal and professional lives. While keeping his true identity secret (“there’s power in being a cipher,” he says), Cook lands a job at Arsenault’s gallery, begins a relationship with the man’s daughter and becomes a party to the dealer’s manipulations and schemes. Both men are like walking NFTs , their artifice obvious to anyone who’s not willing to be had.

The narrator of “Mouth to Mouth” can be counted among the skeptics, mostly. The novel’s cleverest trick is how he and Cook interrogate their roles as storyteller and audience. He listens to his old acquaintance’s monologue through “an increasing indefinable discomfort” that he is being used, while accepting the ego boost he gets from playing Cook’s confessor. (“He knew I was a writer.”) Cook, meanwhile, asserts that he’s merely acting on instinct by spilling his guts to him. “Who better than someone who was there at the beginning?” he asks.

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Cook gives himself away only after reaching the end of his story. “Now it’s yours,” he tells the narrator. “It’s out there. Do with it what you will.”

Wilson makes much the same offer to readers with this sly and energetic novel. Take him up on it.

Jake Cline is a writer and editor in Miami.

Mouth to Mouth

By Antoine Wilson

Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. 192 pp. $26

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‘Mouth to Mouth’ Review: Short Yet Shocking

The first thing that one would notice upon picking up Antoine Wilson’s “Mouth to Mouth” is its brevity. The novel is only 179 pages, divided into chapters that rarely exceed three pages — but what it lacks in length it makes up for in richness. Wilson’s vivid description, stunning characterization, and insightful exploration of morality culminate in an unforgettable book.

“Mouth to Mouth” begins at John F. Kennedy International Airport with the unexpected reunion of two old college acquaintances. The unnamed narrator waits for a delayed flight with fellow passenger Jeff Cook in the first class lounge, listening intently as Cook recounts the events of his life after college. What seems to be a mundane story about lost love turns into a thrilling sequence in which Cook saves a man from drowning with mouth to mouth.

The description of Cook performing CPR is incredibly visceral, exemplifying Wilson’s ability to appeal to the senses. When ribs crack under the weight of chest compressions, Cook can feel “bone scraping against bone.” The lifeless body is haunting: limp and blue, with foamy saltwater dribbling from cold lips. Wilson’s artistry makes it effortless for readers to empathize with Cook’s exhaustion and disgust, as well as his determination to keep the drowned man alive until he regains consciousness. This moment of resuscitation permanently entangles the lives of Cook and the man he saves, esteemed art dealer Francis Arsenault.

Every character in Wilson’s novel feels wonderfully real. His characterization exceeds simple adjectives, instead referring to people like Cook as a “thrift store Adonis” or “long haired guardian angel.” The characters jump off the page, engaging in a natural flow of conversation and reacting to situations with a range of physical movements, facial expressions, and emotions.

After the incident, Cook seeks out Arsenault, but it appears that the art dealer has no recollection of the man who saved his life. Rather than letting it go, Cook deepens his involvement in Arsenault’s existence, encroaching on his workspace and social circles. His preoccupation with Arsenault allows Wilson to open a discussion on morality.

The first subject of Wilson’s moral examination is the art dealer himself. One would expect someone who had a near-death experience to approach life with newfound gratitude. But when Arsenault continues to cheat on his wife and treat others with disrespect, Cook asks himself: Was saving him worth it? Arsenault becomes the poster child for what not to do with a second chance, quickly becoming the novel’s antagonist.

The second subject is Cook. Wilson cleverly tells Cook’s story in the third person, placing an unnamed character in the role of first person narrator instead. This distance between Cook and the narrator is crucial for allowing readers the space to question his morality. There is space for doubt to creep into their minds as to whether his motivations are genuine and virtuous. Readers are nudged even further toward suspicion when the narrator describes his skepticism and questions Cook’s reasoning, only to receive vague answers in return.

Cook’s questionable venture into Arsenault’s life also provides an intimate view of the art world. Much like he did for his characters, Wilson employs detailed descriptions of the Los Angeles art scene to make the atmosphere tangible. He guides readers to become acquainted with the unfamiliar, making great strides in dismantling the art world’s inaccessibility.

In addition to reading books and watching documentaries on the contemporary art world, Wilson took inspiration for this setting from his experiences working in the field in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He recalled in a Q&A at Powell’s Books that he entered the “strange, strange world” knowing almost nothing about it. Wilson’s personal expertise reveals itself when Cook sets foot in the art gallery, conveying the feeling of artistic alienation to readers.

Here, Wilson’s aptitude for comedy shines. Anyone who has struggled to understand contemporary art will find it impossible to suppress a chuckle when Cook looks at a collection of paintings and thinks “a child could have made these.”

Wilson’s novel is made even more captivating by its structure. Cook’s story is frequently interrupted by flashes of the present moment in the airport. These moments make the narrative flow more dynamic and remind readers that they are listening to a story just as much as they are reading a text. The dialogue in these scenes is also impressively realistic, as though Wilson had transcribed real-life conversations. Readers are hooked by what’s to come when Cook foreshadows events with direct statements like “Stick with me here” or “I’ll get to that.”

At the end of the novel, after an emotionally turbulent chain of events, Wilson seems to tie up all loose ends. And yet, the final sentence brings the conclusion into question: Did Cook leave the narrator with a lie?

—Staff writer Nina M. Foster can be reached at [email protected].

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How a long-ago murder shaped Antoine Wilson’s life and his dark, twisty L.A. novel

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Mouth to Mouth

By Antoine Wilson Avid Reader: 192 pages, $26 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Murder is never far from Antoine Wilson’s mind.

The author of “ Panorama City ,” “The Interloper” and this month’s novel, “Mouth to Mouth,” loves to talk about his family. His wife, Chris, is a Hollywood screenwriter who has worked on “Law & Order,” and Chris’ late father, producer Richard Levinson , co-created classic shows like “Columbo” and “ Murder, She Wrote .” Wilson also talks openly about the real-life murder that broke his young life apart (and then became a true-crime staple). The effect this has had on his fiction isn’t always as close to the surface, but it’s always there.

“Mouth to Mouth” has overtones of a murder mystery, though it is more of a caper crossed with a moral parable told by an unreliable narrator. Whether it is about a murder is, well, up in the air. Perspective is everything, as Wilson demonstrates during a Zoom call from his home office in Brentwood, when he turns off his blurred background and reveals himself surrounded by mounds of tinsel and torn giftwrap — the detritus of holiday season.

The novel opens, in a neat framing device, with an airport encounter between an unnamed narrator and an estranged friend, Jeff Cook, from the narrator’s college days at UCLA. Twenty years after graduation, the two men couldn’t be more different. The narrator is flying economy and accepts the invitation to join his old acquaintance in a first-class lounge, where Jeff begins to spin a circuitous tale about the time he saved a man’s life on a Santa Monica beach using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Revived, the man doesn’t thank him, and Jeff wants to understand why.

It turns out that the man he rescued is a well-known Los Angeles art dealer named Francis Arsenault, and Jeff seeks him out. Whether the rescuer is longing for attention or something more transactional doesn’t matter by the book’s midpoint, when he’s secured his place as not only Arsenault’s deputy (and thus a key broker in the cutthroat world of fine art) but the beloved of Arsenault’s beautiful, unstable daughter Chloe.

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Jeff’s tale takes some more wicked turns, dizzying reversals of fortune leading to a final twist that raises questions about culpability, truth, evil and even the moral weight of a human life. It’s a long road for a short book, and it took the author a long time to get there.

Wilson grew up in Montreal, the youngest child of a successful surgeon “who had many sons,” he says. “Three with his first wife and three with his second, my mother.” When Wilson was 7, his father decided to move his second family — a lot: Fresno, Santa Monica, Saudi Arabia, back to Santa Monica. One of the reasons for the frequent moves was the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Wilson’s half-brother, Eric.

“He was 19, and he was driving across the country to visit us,” Wilson says. “His Volkswagen bus broke down, and a couple of drifters helped him fix it in exchange for a ride. They stole the bus and murdered him because they didn’t want a witness to the theft.”

Wilson relates the story plainly but looks down as he continues. “He was missing for months. It was awful, the atmosphere so tense at home. There was a documentary made about it by John Zaritsky called ‘ Just Another Missing Kid ,’ shown on a Canadian series called ‘The Fifth Estate,’ kind of like our ’60 Minutes.’”

He takes a breath. “It won the feature documentary Academy Award a few years later. It’s weird. What did I understand? I understood that he’d been murdered, that he was dead, and there was a sort of wake for him, but there was no body. Not until I was an adult did a lot of that hit me, could I bring my own life experience to bear on those facts.” At the time, it was more than the “little French Canadian boy” could comprehend — let alone the transformation of his brother’s death into a television event.

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Wilson made his own cross-country drive years later, to graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. On the way, he accidentally stopped “in North Platte, the worst possible place, because that’s where Eric had been when he met the drifters.”

His brother’s killer, Raymond Hatch, was out on parole at the time. “I thought, ‘What if I went to the hotel bar and sat down and had a drink and Hatch was right next to me?’ He’s dead now, but you ask yourself, ‘Would I put a cap in the head of someone who murdered my sibling?’ Yeah. I could probably do that.” He muses that the experience left him with two questions: What is justice, and are there people who just shouldn’t receive the benefit of the doubt? It was the start of another journey for Wilson, reckoning with his family’s loss through fiction.

He wrote a short story at Iowa about the murder, “a commingling of memory and imagination of that time.” But his novels would go on to probe those larger questions — about justice, goodness and retribution. His 2007 debut, “The Interloper,” follows an unhinged narrator bent on avenging the murder of his brother-in-law. It includes the line, “It’s the noblest mistake to see the humanity in everyone” — which novelist Jess Walter quoted in his review of the book for The Times. Wilson’s 2012 follow-up, “ Panorama City ,” took a different tack; as Adam Ross wrote in the New York Times, “The author’s gaze is directed heavenward, toward sanity and the good in all of us.”

“Mouth to Mouth,” I suggest to Wilson, marks a return to skepticism about humanity, himself included. He acknowledges that as a fair observation — and refers again to his somewhat unstable upbringing. “I’ve had to become adaptable to different environments and social situations,” he says. “Some people are just strange, right? I grew up feeling that I was not particularly normal, but I really wanted to belong. I’m just glad some people who wrote in my seventh-grade yearbook said I was a nice guy.”

Could any character in “Mouth to Mouth” be described as “a nice guy”? Wilson says Jeff wants to believe he is, “and that’s sort of at the center of the book. You can imagine Jeff coming home and singing ‘How did I get here?’ like The Talking Heads.”

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Wilson isn’t sure how “Mouth to Mouth” got here but he knows it was a long time coming. Cleaning out his computer recently, he found a file: “AirportStory.TXT.” “It describes a name being called over the PA system like Jeff’s is for the narrator; the bio of an art-world person I knew a long time ago; and the image of fireworks from above that winds up on the first page. Just those three things, from 20 years ago, that had been circling in my brain ever since.”

The premise of a man ungrateful to his rescuer also goes back decades: “In the late 1990s, I stopped a man from walking in front of a train. He wasn’t doing it deliberately, but I did save his life, and he said, ‘I’m gonna buy you a big steak dinner!’ Then the train went by, he kept walking, and that was it. I never got my steak dinner!” Wilson laughs. “It’s an interesting moment, when people intersect that way. Unlike murder, it’s not a taboo, but it has the same kind of power. What do you owe someone who saves your life?”

Such dilemmas are the engines of fiction. As for murder and all its entertainments, Wilson is understandably more ambivalent.

“In my wife’s childhood home,” he says, “there are books about murder everywhere, and that has to do with character, who people are when faced with the highest stakes imaginable. But having experienced my brother’s murder? I still don’t love true crime.”

Patrick is a freelance critic who tweets @TheBookMaven .

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MOUTH TO MOUTH

by Antoine Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 11, 2022

A deliciously nasty morality play in the guise of a thriller.

A story within a story about chance encounters and the ways that they can alter lives forever.

At John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, having just arrived from Los Angeles and waiting for a connection to Berlin, the unnamed narrator of Wilson’s third novel recognizes a former classmate from UCLA standing at the ticket counter. The classmate, a man called Jeff Cook, invites the narrator to the first-class lounge to wait for their delayed connection. Over drinks, Jeff decides to tell the narrator a strange tale, beginning just after the two graduated from college years earlier. One morning, overlooking a beach in Santa Monica, Jeff catches sight of a drowning figure and rushes in to save the older male swimmer, giving him the titular rescue maneuver until the swimmer sputters back to life. Afterward, Jeff is haunted by the incident: Did the man live? Would he recognize Jeff if they met again? Jeff discovers the man’s identity: He is Francis Arsenault, a wealthy art dealer, and he has, indeed, survived. But Jeff’s questions multiply and turn to obsession. He begins taking steps to find out even more about Francis and, eventually, to worm his way ever deeper into Francis’ life, to unsettling effect. Wilson’s use of the frame here means the story barrels along on parallel tracks, creating a propulsive interest in the answer to two questions: What will happen as Jeff’s life increasingly revolves around Francis? And why does Jeff seem equally obsessed with telling this story for the first time to an acquaintance he barely knows? Wilson wraps some big questions in this page-turner: Is destiny something that merely happens to us? Or can we manipulate it to great—or devious—ends?

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-982181-80-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Antoine Wilson

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Barbara Kingsolver

by Tana French ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024

An absorbing crime yarn.

A divorced American detective tries to blend into rural Ireland in this sequel to The Searcher (2020).

In fictional Ardnakelty, on Ireland’s west coast, lives retired American cop Cal Hooper, who busies himself repairing furniture with 15-year-old Theresa “Trey” Reddy and fervently wishes to be boring. Then into town pops Trey’s long-gone, good-for-nothing dad, Johnny, all smiles and charm. Much to her distaste, he says he wants to reclaim his fatherly role. In fact, he’s on the run from a criminal for a debt he can’t repay, and he has a cockamamie scheme to persuade local townsfolk that there might be gold in the nearby mountain with a vein that might run through some of their properties. (What, no leprechauns?) “It’s not sheep shite you’ll be smelling in a few months’ time, man,” he tells a farmer. “It’s champagne and caviar.” Some people have fun fantasizing about sudden riches, but they know better. Johnny’s pursuer, Cillian Rushborough, comes to town, and Johnny tries to convince him he could get rich by purchasing people’s land. Alas, someone bashes Rushborough’s brains in, and now there’s a murder mystery. The plot is a bit of a stretch, but the characters and their relationships work well. Trey detests Johnny for not being in her life, and now that he’s back, she neither wants nor needs him. She gets on much better with Cal. Still, she’s a testy teenager when she thinks someone is not treating her like an adult. Cal is aware of this, and he’s careful how he talks to her. Johnny, not so much: “I swear to fuck, women are only put on this earth to wreck our fuckin’ heads,” he whines about Trey’s mother, briefly forgetting he’s talking to Trey. The book abounds in local color and lively dialogue.

Pub Date: March 5, 2024

ISBN: 9780593493434

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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Review: 'mouth to mouth,' by antoine wilson.

The unnamed narrator of Antoine Wilson's "Mouth to Mouth" doesn't spend much time talking about himself. In the rush of the novel's opening pages, he lets on that he is a middle-aged father of two, an alumnus of UCLA, a little-known author with possible cult status in Germany and stuck in the purgatory of JFK Airport awaiting a delayed flight. What else? He's traveling alone, hasn't touched alcohol in eight years and is "taking a much-needed break from family obligations."

At least he was. The story the man is telling took place at some point in the past — Wilson suggests 2010 — and holds within it yet another incident that occurred about 20 years earlier. That second story isn't even about him. It concerns Jeff Cook, a former classmate whom the man barely knew but who, he admits, "was one of those minor players from the past who claimed for himself an outsize role in my memories."

By chance, he and Cook are booked on the same flight to Frankfurt. After some small talk, Cook invites the man to wait out the delay with him in the first-class lounge. "Everything about him conveyed neatness and taste," the writer, conscious of his "scuffed sneakers" and "scruffy backpack," says of Cook, who at UCLA resembled "a sort of thrift-store Adonis" with "cascading hair" and "high, broad cheekbones." More chitchat follows, the two exchange a couple of faded college memories, and then, with obvious calculation, Cook launches into the story — a confession, really — that will dominate the remainder of the men's time in airport limbo as well as this brisk novel's 65 chapters, some covering no more than a page.

If all that makes "Mouth to Mouth" sound a bit traditional, then good. It is, and refreshingly so. Like his characters, Wilson is a first-rate yarn spinner. Cook's Tom Ripley-like story — and the wary narrator's retelling of it — is loaded with fateful encounters, hidden agendas, shrouded identities, adulterous betrayals and brushes with death.

Wilson has been here before. His debut novel, "The Interloper," is a solid if sometimes predictable first-person recollection of a revenge plot that went horribly south. That book's follow-up, "Panorama City," is terrific — a deathbed chronicle from an eccentric man-child who in the end discovers he isn't dying, after all.

In both novels, the narrators are acutely aware of their preposterousness. They question their memories and motives, and understand that by sharing their stories, they are relinquishing ownership of them. "I just want you to keep in mind that what we see, what we think we see, I should say, is always changed by the words in our heads," the narrator of "Panorama City" says in a message to his unborn son.

Cook, too, is aware that his story may be hard for his audience to believe, particularly because he admits to having never shared it with anyone before. Insisting that his former classmate's "appearing out of nowhere must have sparked some old circuitry" in his brain, Cook recounts how in his early 20s he brought a drowned man back to life on a Santa Monica beach. His initial curiosity about the man he rescued — a Beverly Hills art dealer named Francis Arsenault — gives way to parasitic obsession.

"I didn't think I'd saved a saint," Cook says, "I hadn't expected to, everyone has their flaws. I wanted him to be good, though, I wanted to feel that I had done a good thing not only for him but for all the people he came in contact with."

Cook infiltrates Arsenault's personal and professional lives. While keeping his true identity secret ("there's power in being a cipher," he says), Cook lands a job at Arsenault's gallery, begins a relationship with the man's daughter and becomes a party to the dealer's manipulations and schemes. Both men are like walking NFTs, their artifice obvious to anyone who's not willing to be had.

The narrator of "Mouth to Mouth" can be counted among the skeptics, mostly. The novel's cleverest trick is how he and Cook interrogate their roles as storyteller and audience. He listens to his old acquaintance's monologue through "an increasing indefinable discomfort" that he is being used, while accepting the ego boost he gets from playing Cook's confessor ("he knew I was a writer").

Cook, meanwhile, asserts that he's merely acting on instinct by spilling his guts to him. "Who better than someone who was there at the beginning?" he asks.

Cook gives himself away only after reaching the end of his story. "Now it's yours," he tells the narrator. "It's out there. Do with it what you will."

Wilson makes much the same offer to readers with this sly and energetic novel. Take him up on it.

Jake Cline is a Miami-based writer and editor.

Mouth to Mouth

By: Antoine Wilson.

Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 192 pages, $26.

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Table of Contents

Reading group guide.

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About The Book

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About The Author

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels  Panorama City  and  The Interloper . His work has appeared in  The Paris Review ,  StoryQuarterly ,  Best New American Voices , and the Los Angeles Times ,   among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of  A Public Space . A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles. His website is: AntoineWilson.com.

Product Details

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (January 11, 2022)
• Length: 192 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181802

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• Fiction > Psychological
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Raves and Reviews

“A slow burn à la Patricia Highsmith that keeps us terminally off balance.” — Oprah Daily “Psychologically complex and suspenseful until the literal last sentence, it uses every word of its 200 or so pages to the fullest.” — NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour “[An] enthralling literary puzzle… Wilson is a gorgeous writer, pulling you in and compelling you to keep reading. The story, and the story-within-the-story — the twists and turns, the attention lavished on motivation and emotion, the efforts to rationalize or at least explain strange or unsavory behavior — recall the cool prose of Paul Auster… This powerful, intoxicating book’s greatest tension is that we have no idea where it is heading, right up to the shocking final sentence.” —Sarah Lyall, The New York Times “[A] taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting… Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception—and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before.” — Vogue “Wilson is a first-rate yarn spinner… [a] sly and energetic novel.” — The Washington Post “Incredibly taut, with funny and brilliantly described scenes of the Los Angeles art world... [ Mouth to Mouth is] powered by a kind of ominous propulsive forward momentum right up until the very end, which is unexpected and inevitable, as all the best endings are.” — Vanity Fair "Oh, to have an afternoon free and to have not yet read Mouth to Mouth ! ... [A] sleek train crash of a novel." —Maris Kreizman, Vulture “A gloriously addicting tale of decisions and deception… Despite the story being a short once, it doesn’t lack suspense — and Wilson’s ending delivers.” —Buzzfeed “Antoine Wilson’s Mouth To Mouth is the best book I’ve read in ages. Narratively ingenious, delicately written, intriguingly plotted, it is literature of the highest quality. I see you now, dear Reader, with this novel in your hand and already losing track of time….” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less “ Mouth to Mouth is that rarity, a perfect narrative machine, working by its own laws. The cool nervous clarity of the prose enmeshes the reader in a trap of complicity, one snapping shut on narrator and reader at the same instant. Bravo.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude "Antoine Wilson's Mouth to Mouth is sleek, swift, and graceful, an agile novel of ideas with unexpectedly sharp teeth." —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Florida "The writing is superb, the pace pitch-perfect, the slim story so gripping I read it within 24 hours... It starts with a near-drowning and unfolds naturally, with turns so shocking that I had no idea where the tale was going." —Lauren Daley, The Boston Globe “[A] propulsive… page-turner… A deliciously nasty morality play in the guise of a thriller.” — Kirkus Reviews “[A] shifty work of psychological suspense…There’s plenty of satisfaction in watching the characters navigate the blurred line between plausibility and truth.” — Publishers Weekly "By the end of the slim volume Antoine Wilson has made sure to wallop the reader with the realization that the story has been eerier than they ever realized." — Entertainment Weekly “Reminiscent of the cult classic film My Dinner with Andre … Antoine Wilson's slyly disturbing and shrewd novel presents two college acquaintances who unexpectedly cross paths at an airport almost 20 years later… Stopping isn't an option: that final sentence rewards readers with a didn't-see-that-coming gut punch.” — Shelf Awareness "The sinewy and mesmerizing narrative of Antoine Wilson’s masterful novel aims straight at the heart of the mythologized self, which, like the world of art and commerce that provides the story’s backdrop, trades in all forms of performance and deception. Not unlike the novel itself, which asks us to believe and doubt and then believe again within the space of a single sentence. Wilson’s on a high wire and he never makes a wrong move." —Marisa Silver, author of Little Nothing and The Mysteries "Antoine Wilson has written a spellbinding novel of laserlike insight and exquisite technique that reveals how stories can function to conceal other stories. I read this book in one rapturous sitting, jotting down line after line, riveted until the final shocking, clarifying sentence." —Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness "Compulsively readable. This austere and addictive novel interrogates the very nature of identity, destiny and storytelling." —Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son “Antoine Wilson has written a stunner of a novel. Mouth to Mouth shook and thrilled me from the first page to the last.” — Daniel Alarcón, author of The King is Always Above the People and At Night We Walk in Circles "Riveting and sharp, Mouth to Mouth is an engrossing look at the opportunities and events that change and shift lives in drastic fashion." —Off the Shelf “This book might be sold as a psychological thriller, but it’s really—and, if allusions can be spoilers, then this might be a big one—a Gen-X Greek revenge fantasy. Gnarly, dude.” — Washington Independent Review of Books "[A] roller-coaster ride of a novel." —Alta "This psychological novel, which takes a page from American crime writer Dorothy B. Hughes, is an exciting, seamy pleasure to read." —Everything Zoomer "Wilson chronicles the aftermath of a lifesaving rescue of an art dealer — and the twisting corridors of power and identity that this novel’s protagonist ends up hurtling down in its wake." —Vol. 1 Brooklyn “A memorable novel that keeps the reader enthralled right up to the final line… masterfully written [and] undeniably compelling… Mouth to Mouth is a story within a story and it is a perfect January read to curl up with on a cold day.” — The Suburban “Wilson writes a compulsively readable narrative up to the very end.” — The Los Angeles Daily News “Propulsive, slim, and inventive… Mouth to Mouth [is a] Russian doll of a novel.” —Sloane Crosley, Departures “Written in smooth, elegant prose that vibrates with a malevolent undercurrent, this psychological thriller brings to mind Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train … a multi-level cat and mouse affair…” — Passport Magazine

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He Said, He Said

Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth is a literary hall of mirrors.

Simple enough. But the questions that arise from that act—was it worth it? what did it change?—have significance and depth. Wilson’s prose may be as clear as his narrative, but it leaves room for a lot of moral inquiry. After all, as we learn early in the novel, Jeff has never told anyone about this experience. The atmosphere is one of a secret, then a campfire tale, then something closer to a horror story.

With the narrator as captive audience—there’s nothing to do until the flight finally begins to board—Jeff describes his discovery of a man drowning off a beach in Santa Monica. After diving to his rescue, Jeff successfully revives the man via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions. His lifesaving effort breaks a few ribs, but a lifeguard later reassures him, “If they don’t crack, they don’t come back.”

Through some surreptitious investigating, Jeff identifies the person he has saved as Francis, a prominent gallery owner in Beverly Hills. Jeff begins to shadow him, then infiltrates his life, taking a job in the gallery without revealing who he is. As Jeff spins it—taking us into unreliable-narrator territory—there’s a certain humility involved; he doesn’t want to come across as expecting anything in return for what he’s done. Still, avoiding one form of discomfort exposes Jeff to others. First, his surveillance leads him to suspect that Francis is having an affair. Then, he watches as Francis forces the gallery staff to endure humiliating tantrums.

What kind of savior are you if the person you’ve saved is disreputable, even ugly?

Considering that question by yourself, in private, is the stuff of meditation, perhaps prayer. But considering it with somebody else, in a first-class airport lounge—well, now you’ve crossed into the realm of conspiracy. Wilson could have written Mouth to Mouth from Jeff’s perspective. But instead the book becomes a dialogue, which darkens and deepens the narrative that Jeff is laying out.

What Wilson is suggesting is that our identities depend on our histories with others. At what point do they become uncomfortably, inappropriately braided? Eventually, Jeff emerges as Francis’s protégé and, later, as a successful art dealer himself. Is this something he has stolen from Francis, or is it his due? Jeff has literally given some part of his life to Francis, breathed it into him; in turn, Francis projects some part of his life onto Jeff. Then Jeff projects both lives onto the narrator, who is left to wrestle with the implications of complicity.

Because the novel is set in the art world, themes of doubling and projection multiply. How much of what we see on a canvas is representative of the mind of its creator? How much of a collector’s personality is reflected in the work they buy? For Wilson, none of these questions are easy, or charming, or speak to our human connectedness. Instead, they’re burdens that raise issues of obligation and become sources of suspicion. The narrator notices Jeff’s tics, the way his repeated turns of phrase suggest he’s not saying everything (“there it was again, no planning or forethought”). The mood is Hitchcockian.

That feeling intensifies in the novel’s final act, which involves further doubling and mirroring. The more he insinuates himself, the more Jeff mirrors Francis; the more he is drawn into the story, the more the narrator mirrors Jeff; the more we’re seduced by what he hears, the more we mirror the narrator. Wilson performs a neat trick here by routinely sliding Jeff’s narrative out of quotation, which makes the narrator both a witness to the drama and its creator. Dread materializes out of the creeping feeling that comes from any stalker story: empathy ceases to be empathetic when we move from understanding somebody’s life to co-opting it.

As the narrator tells us, “[Jeff] was getting a clearer picture of the man he’d rescued. Possibly even a clearer picture than Francis had of himself, in some ways, because those who watch our behavior might know us better than we know ourselves. Whose self-image is ever accurate?”

The answer, of course, is nobody’s. But the image we try to impose on others is rarely accurate either. Wilson is masterfully subdued when it comes to characterizing Jeff. He’s neither savior nor exploiter—or if he is one of these, it’s a function of our projections onto him. Only on the very last page, with a brushstroke of a sentence, does Wilson introduce a detail that tilts the ledger.

Before that, Jeff is working through some reasonable questions: If we save somebody’s life, are we obligated to help that life mean something? Existence isn’t as pliable as that. But a novel is a fine way to explore the instinct; the form thrives in parallels and ironies and metaphors. The spare, direct structure of Mouth to Mouth leaves room to tangle with the messier frustrations of identity. If we can’t live in harmony with others, we’re stuck being ourselves.

“Have you ever wanted to zero out the past?” Wilson writes. “…It’s impossible…. We have to live with our choices.” A simple point made in the middle of a novel, yet you cannot help but feel its crushing weight.•

Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster MOUTH TO MOUTH , BY ANTOINE WILSON

Mark Athitakis is the author of The New Midwest  (Belt Publishing), a critical study of contemporary fiction set in the region. He lives in Arizona.

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Mouth to Mouth

Now in Paperback AVID READER PRESS (SIMON & SCHUSTER)

EVENTS / ORDER Mouth to Mouth / MEDIA Q&A

Mouth to mouth:.

A successful art dealer confesses the story of his rise to a former classmate in an airport bar – a story that begins with his rescue and resuscitation of a drowning man, with whom he will become inextricably linked, to disturbing ends.

With Highsmithian undertones and propulsive pacing, Mouth to Mouth raises big questions—about accountability, identity, morality and fate—in a story both profound and compulsively readable.

Praise for Mouth to Mouth :

FEATURED ON BARACK OBAMA’S SUMMER READING LIST FINALIST FOR THE PRIX FITZGERALD LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE CALIBA GOLDEN POPPY AWARD A Los Angeles Times BESTSELLER A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2022 A Vogue BEST BOOK of 2022 AN Esquire BEST BOOK of 2022 A NPR BEST BOOK of 2022 A CBC BEST BOOK of 2022 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA NEWS GROUP’S 10 NOTEWORTHY BOOKS OF 2022

“[An] enthralling literary puzzle… Wilson is a gorgeous writer, pulling you in and compelling you to keep reading. The story, and the story-within-the-story — the twists and turns, the attention lavished on motivation and emotion, the efforts to rationalize or at least explain strange or unsavory behavior — recall the cool prose of Paul Auster… This powerful, intoxicating book’s greatest tension is that we have no idea where it is heading, right up to the shocking final sentence.”

Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

“propulsive, slim, and inventive… Mouth to Mouth [is a] Russian doll of a novel.” Sloane Crosley, Departures

“Incredibly taut, with funny and brilliantly described scenes of the Los Angeles art world.”— Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

“[A] taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting… Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception—and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before.” Vogue

“A taut, heady thriller” Los Angeles Times

“Wilson is a first-rate yarn spinner… [a] sly and energetic novel.” Washington Post

“Psychologically complex and suspenseful until the literal last sentence, it uses every word of its 200 or so pages to the fullest.” NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour

“Wilson writes a compulsively readable narrative up to the very end.” Los Angeles Daily News

“A little bomb of a novel” GateCrashers

“A Gen-X Greek revenge fantasy” Washington Independent Review of Books

“Compelling” The Toronto Star

“A storytelling triumph… this novel is intentional, focused and expertly delivered. Wilson captures the reader’s attention from the beginning and holds it all the way to the end.” Michigan Daily

“I myself loved this riveting and smart novel. And: the perfect ending will make you gasp.” Edan Lepucki, The Millions

“A gloriously addicting tale of decisions and deception… Wilson’s ending delivers.” BuzzFeed Books

“Tightly coiled… Mouth to Mouth delivers a tidy story that also will make readers wonder how much of Jeff’s story is true and how much is just a good yarn.” The Sun Sentinel

“a carefully sculpted masterpiece… Mouth to Mouth provokes deep philosophical questions about the nature of truth and fiction.” Powell’s Books

“[A] roller-coaster ride of a novel.” Alta Online

“Reminiscent of the cult classic film ‘My Dinner with Andre’… Antoine Wilson’s slyly disturbing and shrewd novel presents two college acquaintances who unexpectedly cross paths at an airport almost 20 years later…. Stopping isn’t an option: that final sentence rewards readers with a didn’t-see-that-coming gut punch.” Shelf Awareness

“[A] propulsive… page-turner… A deliciously nasty morality play in the guise of a thriller.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Wilson’s Mouth To Mouth is the best book I’ve read in ages. Narratively ingenious, delicately written, intriguingly plotted, it is literature of the highest quality. I see you now, dear Reader, with this novel in your hand and already losing track of time….”

Andrew Sean Greer , Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less

“Antoine Wilson has written a spellbinding novel of laserlike insight and exquisite technique that reveals how stories can function to conceal other stories. I read this book in one rapturous sitting, jotting down line after line, riveted until the final shocking, clarifying sentence.”

Sarah Manguso , author of Ongoingness and 300 Arguments

“Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth is sleek, swift, and graceful, an agile novel of ideas with unexpectedly sharp teeth.”

Lauren Groff , author of Fates and Furies and Matrix

“The sinewy and mesmerizing narrative of Antoine Wilson’s masterful novel aims straight at the heart of the mythologized self, which, like the world of art and commerce that provides the story’s backdrop, trades in all forms of performance and deception. Not unlike the novel itself, which asks us to believe and doubt and then believe again within the space of a single sentence. Wilson’s on a high wire and he never makes a wrong move.”

Marisa Silver , author of Little Nothing and The Mysteries

“Compulsively readable. This austere and addictive novel interrogates the very nature of identity, destiny and storytelling.”

Adam Johnson , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son

“Antoine Wilson has written a stunner of a novel. Mouth to Mouth shook and thrilled me from the first page to the last.”

Daniel Alarcón , author of The King is Always Above the People and At Night We Walk in Circles

“A fascinating contemporary twist on the classic ‘as told to’ novel, Mouth To Mouth strands two old accquaintances in an airport VIP lounge, where we are alternately charmed and alarmed by a fantastic tale of love, fate and a meteoric rise in the art world. Mesmerizing.”

Janet Fitch , author of Chimes of a Lost Cathedral and Paint It Black .

“ Mouth to Mouth is that rarity, a perfect narrative machine, working by its own laws. The cool nervous clarity of the prose enmeshes the reader in a trap of complicity, one snapping shut on narrator and reader at the same instant. Bravo.”

Jonathan Lethem , author of The Arrest and The Feral Detective .

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Mia Levitin

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

What is the value of saving someone’s life if they turn out to be “an asshole”? In his latest novel, a Highsmithian literary thriller, Antoine Wilson tracks the aftermath of a fateful intersection of two strangers.

The story at the heart of Mouth to Mouth is nested within a framing device. The narrator, a struggling writer in his forties, runs into Jeff Cook, an old classmate from UCLA, while on a layover at JFK. With both of their flights delayed, Cook invites him to the lounge and, over beers, proceeds to share a story he claims he has never told anyone before.

While Wilson’s first two novels plumbed the polarities of good and evil, ‘Mouth to Mouth’ keeps us guessing by swinging between the two

Shortly after graduation, alone on a Santa Monica beach, Cook sees a swimmer in crisis. Acting on instinct, he rescues and resuscitates the drowning man. When he doesn’t receive any thanks, Cook becomes curious about the person he gave a second chance at life, a gallerist named Francis Arsenault. Cook tails him, ostensibly to make sure he’s all right. He takes an entry-level job at Arsenault’s gallery but gets more embroiled than expected when he begins dating Arsenault’s daughter, Chloe, and is quickly promoted. “I never forget a face,” says Arsenault, but doesn’t let on if he recognises Cook from the beach.

Wilson’s 2007 debut, The Interloper , was a first-person account of a man who becomes increasingly unhinged as he seeks to avenge the murder of his brother-in-law. In his 2012 follow-up, Panorama City , Wilson pivoted from noir to humour, with a Forrest Gump-type narrator imparting wisdom to his unborn son.

While Wilson’s first two novels plumbed the polarities of good and evil, Mouth to Mouth keeps us guessing by swinging between the two. When Cook rescues Arsenault, he is comforted by the idea that the act suggests he’s a good person. Arsenault, by contrast, later tells him that “there is no good or bad, only advantageous and its opposite” and that youth is about going after “everything you want”. As Arsenault takes him under his wing, Cook’s eyes open to the gallerist’s shady dealings.

The book’s title refers of course to the resuscitation performed to save Arsenault, an act that could be considered the opposite of murder. But with the reliability of Cook’s narrative called into question, it also suggests the passing of stories from one person to another. “You knew me then. That I had a good heart,” Cook replies when the narrator asks why he’s chosen to tell him about the intervention on the beach and all that ensued. What kind of self-portrait is Cook hoping to paint by sharing his secrets with a writer?

Despite the risk of creating distance with a framing narrative, the precision with which Wilson details the worlds in which the story unfolds — from the first-class lounge to the LA art scene — renders it real. In a landscape of literary fiction trending towards navel-gazing, it’s a delight to read a pacy story, well told. Wilson’s propulsive prose moves the plot forward until the novel’s final twist in its last sentence. Mouth to Mouth is to be devoured in one greedy gulp, but the questions it raises linger long afterwards.

Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson, Atlantic Books £12.99/Avid Reader Press $26, 192 pages

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Mouth to Mouth

• Unabridged Audio Download

Table of Contents

Reading group guide.

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

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About The Author

Antoine Wilson is the author of the novels  Panorama City  and  The Interloper . His work has appeared in  The Paris Review ,  StoryQuarterly ,  Best New American Voices , and the Los Angeles Times ,   among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of  A Public Space . A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles. His website is: AntoineWilson.com.

Product Details

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (January 17, 2023)
• Length: 208 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181819

Browse Related Books

• Fiction > Psychological
• Fiction > Thrillers > Suspense
• Fiction > Literary

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• 10 Epic Books Under 250 pages - Off the Shelf
• New in Paperback: 11 January Releases to Add to Your Winter Book Pile - Off the Shelf
• Up All Night Sweepstakes: Enter for Chance to Win a Thrilling Bookish Prize Pack - Off the Shelf
• 10 Unique Thrillers Unlike Anything I’ve Read Before - Off the Shelf
• Barack Obama Recommends: 6 Notable Picks to Add to Your TBR - Off the Shelf
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Raves and Reviews

“A slow burn à la Patricia Highsmith that keeps us terminally off balance.” — Oprah Daily “Psychologically complex and suspenseful until the literal last sentence, it uses every word of its 200 or so pages to the fullest.” — NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour “[An] enthralling literary puzzle… Wilson is a gorgeous writer, pulling you in and compelling you to keep reading. The story, and the story-within-the-story — the twists and turns, the attention lavished on motivation and emotion, the efforts to rationalize or at least explain strange or unsavory behavior — recall the cool prose of Paul Auster… This powerful, intoxicating book’s greatest tension is that we have no idea where it is heading, right up to the shocking final sentence.” —Sarah Lyall, The New York Times “[A] taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting… Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception—and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before.” — Vogue “Wilson is a first-rate yarn spinner… [a] sly and energetic novel.” — The Washington Post “Incredibly taut, with funny and brilliantly described scenes of the Los Angeles art world... [ Mouth to Mouth is] powered by a kind of ominous propulsive forward momentum right up until the very end, which is unexpected and inevitable, as all the best endings are.” — Vanity Fair “A gloriously addicting tale of decisions and deception… Despite the story being a short once, it doesn’t lack suspense — and Wilson’s ending delivers.” —Buzzfeed “Antoine Wilson’s Mouth To Mouth is the best book I’ve read in ages. Narratively ingenious, delicately written, intriguingly plotted, it is literature of the highest quality. I see you now, dear Reader, with this novel in your hand and already losing track of time….” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less “ Mouth to Mouth is that rarity, a perfect narrative machine, working by its own laws. The cool nervous clarity of the prose enmeshes the reader in a trap of complicity, one snapping shut on narrator and reader at the same instant. Bravo.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude "By the end of the slim volume Antoine Wilson has made sure to wallop the reader with the realization that the story has been eerier than they ever realized." — Entertainment Weekly “A tale of deceit, intrigue, and tested morality...jaw-dropping." — Time , A Best Book of the Year

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An Inverse Mirroring of the Frame in “Mouth to Mouth”

Like Gone Girl , Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth is a thriller titled after its inciting incident.  It’s the early nineties, and Jeff Cook, an aimless recent college graduate saves the life of a drowning swimmer off of Santa Monica beach by diving into the surf and performing CPR on the man. Though he doesn’t realize it, this act is Jeff’s first step on a journey into the rarefied world of the Los Angeles art scene. That’s the inner story of this novel, at least, and its frame is a chance meeting at an airport decades later.  

In the present day, our narrator, an American author of middling to low notability finds his flight delayed one morning on a layover at JFK. Waiting at the gate, he recognizes one of his co-travellers as a classmate from college. The classmate is none other than Jeff Cook, who only wore “ripped-up jeans and weathered T-shirts” when the two were students together at UCLA, but who is now a “handsome man in his forties… dressed in a sharp blue suit” and “glasses with transparent Lucite frames.”  Jeff recognizes the narrator as well, and invites him to a first-class airport lounge to recount to him his transformation from the t-shirt-and-faded-jeans Jeff to the elegantly-suited businessman standing before him, beginning with his rescue of the drowning man.   

The man he saved was, it turns out, Francis Arsenault, a renowned, career-making art dealer and though Arsenault, unconscious at the time of his rescue, doesn’t know the identity of his rescuer, Jeff, tipped off by a lifeguard at the scene of the rescue, learns where Arsenault works. From there, he slowly ingratiates himself into Arsenault’s life, starting to work for him at his art gallery and then dating his daughter, all without Arsenault’s knowledge that Jeff is the young man who saved his life.  

Although the sections where Jeff tells his story, with their expansive prose and word-for-word memorization of dialogue, strain the pretense that this is a story told second-hand, Wilson does have a real use for his framing device. The novel’s narrator, a stand-in for Wilson, airs his suspicions of Jeff’s motives for telling his story and questions his reliability, and two levels of tension drive the novel’s plot: the first, at the level of Jeff’s story, comes from the suspense about whether Jeff will be found out as the person who saved Arsenault’s life, a fact he feels he must constantly conceal from Arsenault—even if he’s only concealing an act of personal heroism. The second, at the level of the frame story, comes from the question of why Jeff is telling his story and what it is Jeff wants to confess to his erstwhile classmate.  “As his story proceeded, I felt an increasing indefinable discomfort,” the narrator confesses to us as he listens to Jeff’s story. “Was it excavation, though, Jeff getting everything off his chest?  Or was he painting for me a self-portrait?  And what is a self-portrait if not self-serving?”

Indeed, there is an interesting inverse mirroring of the frame story told in the airport lounge and the story story set in LA. In the latter, Jeff is the middle-class outsider awed by Arsenault’s wealth. And in the former, Jeff is the wealthy businessman, in contrast to our narrator who’s toting a “scruffy backpack” and who’d booked his flight “last minute at the cheapest possible fare.”  At both levels, money carries with it the whiff of suspicion, and as the story progresses its portrayal of Arsenault’s character grows increasingly darker, and Jeff’s character, and story, become increasingly unreliable. As our understanding of the nature of their fortunes grows, so too does our suspicion that something inevitably tragic lies at the end of it. There is something ominous about wealth in itself, especially at its most rarefied levels.  Its necessary accompaniments, power and sex hang in the wings, and Wilson points the reader to the shadows they cast.

That said, this isn’t a story to stand around too long musing about itself. This is a compact novel, with only a single story to tell, and Wilson intends to tell it well. I rather like the idea of a short thriller.  Dragged on too long, mounting tension loses its power. At every moment, in Wilson’s story, the reader is ready to rush onward to find what will happen next. This makes for great readability, but what is gained in speed is sometimes lost in depth. The novel suggests more than it can flesh out in its 200 pages, and though Wilson spares us red herrings, false starts, and dead ends for the most part, you can see that there are some diversions he could have taken to give us a more complete picture of the world he has constructed. The hint, for example, that Arsenault’s gallery is involved with money laundering might better have been left unmentioned, if Wilson was unprepared to fully commit to its exploration.

Who We Are in a Crowd in “The Goth House Experiment”

As Wilson brings his work to its rapid-paced conclusion, he—like a pilot doing everything he can to stick a tight landing—jettisons everything that is not absolutely necessary to the plot so that he can reach his conclusion at the right time, with the right force. I would have preferred to be given a slower, more thoughtful, and more revealing ending, but the one that he provides is powerful and, in retrospect, inevitable. His is a vessel of sleek curves, and the engineering was always in the engine, not in the brakes. These days, not even the rich have time for leisure. This book is an entertainment to be consumed quickly, a postprandial diversion after lunch, the power of the ride it takes us on to be savored only for a few moments before an announcement of evening cocktails.

FICTION Mouth to Mouth By Antoine Wilson Avid Reader Press Published January 11, 2022

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Mouth to Mouth

By antoine wilson.

A ntoine Wilson’s suspenseful thriller Mouth to Mouth begins with a chance encounter. The novel’s unnamed narrator runs into his former college classmate Jeff Cook at the airport. Soon, Jeff reveals to the narrator a tale of deceit, intrigue, and tested morality as they both wait for their flights. With puzzling urgency, Jeff divulges the strange story of how he once rescued Francis, a wealthy art dealer. Their lives appear to be eerily interconnected—and the narrative Jeff spins blurs the lines between fiction and reality. As he unveils more of his shocking interactions with Francis, Jeff keeps the narrator on the edge of his seat, until Mouth to Mouth ’s jaw-dropping finale. — Cady Lang

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Talking ‘Dune’: Book and Movies

The times’s critic alissa wilkinson discusses frank herbert’s classic science fiction novel and denis villeneuve’s film adaptations..

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Frank Herbert’s epic novel “Dune” and its successors have been entrenched in the science fiction and fantasy canon for almost six decades, a rite of passage for proudly nerdy readers across the generations. But “Dune” is experiencing a broader cultural resurgence at the moment thanks to Denis Villeneuve’s recent film adaptations starring Timothée Chalamet . ( Part 2 is in theaters now.)

This week on the podcast, Gilbert Cruz talks to The Times’s critic Alissa Wilkinson, who covers movies, culture and religion, about Herbert’s novel, Villeneuve’s films and the enduring hold of Fremen lore on the audience’s imagination.

“There’s a couple things that I think are really unsettling in ‘Dune,’” Wilkinson says. “One is, the vision of Frank Herbert was, I believe, to basically write a book that questioned authoritarians and hero mythology genuinely, across the board. Any kind of a hero figure he is proposing will always have things and people come up alongside that hero figure that distort their influence. Even if they intend well, if they’re benevolent, there’s still all of this really awful stuff that comes along with it. So Paul is a messiah figure — we believe he wants good things for most of the book — and then he turns on a dime or it feels like he might be turning on a dime. You can never quite tell where anyone stands in this book. And I think that is unsettling, especially because so many of the other kinds of things that we watch — the superhero movies, “Star Wars,” whatever — there’s a clear-cut good and evil fight going on. Good and evil don’t really exist in ‘Dune.’”

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