Mouth to Mouth: ‘Gripping... Shades of Patricia Highsmith and Donna Tartt’ Vogue

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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. In 1997, the writer Antoine Wilson was visiting Seattle. He was down by the water with some friends. We hadn’t been friends, exactly, barely acquaintances, but Jeff was one of those minor players from the past who claimed for himself an outsize role in my memories. Jeff’s story seems to have many endings: when he leaves Francis on the mountain, the immediate aftermath of the man’s death and its consequences in Jeff’s life, and the novel’s final line. Knowing all this information, what do you think really happened? What does it mean for your reading experience that the reveal is left ambiguous? Jeff reveals that after that traumatic, galvanizing morning on the beach, he was compelled to learn more about the man whose life he had saved, convinced that their fates were now entwined. But are we agents of our fate—or are we its pawns? Upon discovering that the man is renowned art dealer Francis Arsenault, Jeff begins to surreptitiously visit his Beverly Hills gallery. Although Francis does not seem to recognize him as the man who saved his life, he nevertheless casts his legendary eye on Jeff and sees something worthy. He takes the younger man under his wing, initiating him into his world, where knowledge, taste, and access are currency; a world where value is constantly shifting and calling into question what is real, and what matters. The paths of the two men come together and diverge in dizzying ways until the novel’s staggering ending.

I didn’t mention that I was traveling on my own dime, hoping to capitalize on a German magazine’s labeling me a “cult author.” Or that I was also taking a much-needed break from family obligations, carving out a week from carpools and grocery shopping to live the life readers picture writers live full-time. Michael Kimball first caught my attention in 1985 with Firewater Pond, a boisterously comic novel set in rural Maine and populated by an assortment of aging hippies, horny teenagers, and scheming, small town politicians. After much too long a silence, Kimball resurfaced in 1996 with Undone, a suspense novel that marked a major change of artistic direction. Now, a mere four years later, Kimball has published his third novel, Mouth to Mouth. It too is a suspense novel, and it's a beauty: a moody, brooding, Gothic account of murder, madness, and festering family secrets. SHAPIRO: I also know it's simplistic to talk about what a book is about with a capital A, but my sense of what this book is, quote-unquote, "about" just kept changing as I went through the book. And a lot has been said about the last sentence, which I'm not going to spoil. But up until the last sentence of this book, it's constantly changing. Mouth to Mouth is an intelligent, emotionally wrenching novel that does its work on more than one level. First of all, it is a tense, thoroughly professional thriller that becomes more and more absorbing as the narrative progresses. Kimball has the true writer's eye for character, action, and atmosphere, and his novel is filled with vividly constructed sequences -- a protracted drowning, a forbidden erotic encounter between Ellen and Neal, a staged conflagration in the Chambers's newly rebuilt barn, a climactic encounter in a frozen, flooded valley -- that are alternately frightening and hypnotically fascinating. While it’s not required, you can use the Disqus tag to hide book details that may spoil the reading experience for others, e.g., “Dumbledore dies.”

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Jeff is obsessed with his perceived goodness, and he provides few details that make Francis out to be anything other than an asshole. Do you think the novel makes a case for what makes a moral or corrupt person? How does it comment on the human condition?

WILSON: No, no, no. He's just a sort of functional, semi-malignant narcissist type and a perfect figure to dominate the art world or, you know, his little corner of the art world because it is a world that's very manipulable, and he is a master manipulator. Stars — What an odd-story indeed. With its short and sharp chapters that leave you wanting more more more, the unnamed character, and audience at the centre of this story is — for me — it’s finest asset though as he act Split up into pairs and imagine you find yourself in Jeff and the narrator’s position: happening upon a person from your past. Write a scene about a pivotal moment in one character’s life in the style of Jeff’s story and the narrator’s commentary. Bonus points if you cast doubt on the storyteller in subtle ways. When everyone is finished, take turns sharing with the rest of the group. The gate agent bent behind the counter to retrieve something from the printer. She handed Jeff his identification and boarding pass. He thanked her and turned to go. When he came past me, I said his name. This is the fifth book in the Lakewood Hospital series but it works as a standalone too. Sarah is a paramedic who has a wonderful circle of friends and will do almost anything for them. Spreading herself too thin she faints in the ER. Her secret crush, Nurse Veronica catches her, unfortunately, Veronica’s not in the mood for foolish women who forget to eat and gives Sarah an earful. Veronica is dealing with a break up of her longtime girlfriend who won’t just won’t go away. She doesn’t have the time to deal with gorgeous paramedics who happen to fall into her arms…or does she?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: Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth is sleek, swift, and graceful, an agile novel of ideas with unexpectedly sharp teeth.” 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. Mouth to Mouth is a novel that explores themes of money, fate and morality through the eyes of an art dealer named Jeff who confesses the real story behind his success. In a first-class lounge at JFK airport, the book's narrator listens as a former classmate he vaguely remembers shares the story of his adult life — a life that forever changed course when he saved a man from drowning.

I listened to the 5 hour audiobook narrated by Edoardo Ballerini who does a fabulous job leading the listener through this edgy story. I love his unique voicing skills!

By Lisa Moore

Coming out of surgery,” he said, “waking up in the recovery room, foggy as hell, I didn’t feel the sense of relief I had expected to feel—that only came later when I saw my family again. I felt like I’d lost a chunk of time. Like sleep, but when you sleep you wake up where you went down. I felt that things had happened to me without my knowledge, which they had, of course, and I was left with the uncanny sense that I wasn’t the same person who had gone under. Time had passed, a part of my body was no longer in me, I had had a square shaved from my leg for some kind of circuit-completing electrode, but I was still I, obviously. Now, this may have been a side effect of the drugs, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d only just arrived in the world, as a replacement for the old me. It wore off, as I said, but it wasn’t a pleasant state.” SHAPIRO: Although, it's not like he's Hitler or Stalin. He's kind of a jerk and a bully and a philanderer, but he's not somebody, you know, who commits genocide or something. Alana: I have finally made my way into podcasts and my attention span can barely handle it! You’re totally right that different conditions influence how you relate to a book. I like that Judge Farah talked about reading Mouth to Mouth out loud, but that made me wonder if it stood a chance. Would you ever choose a book that made you modify your reading habits over one that didn’t? WILSON: Oh, yeah. Totally. In fact, it had been reviewed among some other thrillers. And, you know, I was like, well, I didn't mean to write a thriller. But did I write a thriller? 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.”

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. Meave: Speaking librarianly, I wouldn’t sort The Book of Goose with the young adult novels, but I would absolutely recommend it to young adults. How would you categorize it, if you were working at BookOps? WILSON: Sure. And then the narrator who started - you know, they were in the same film class together. And the narrator is this sort of shambolic writer who hasn't quite built his life in the same way, at least materially, as Jeff.In Wilson’s debut novel, The Interloper , the male protagonist writes letters to a prison inmate in the guise of a lovelorn woman and becomes more consumed (and expressive) in that reality than in his own tedious marriage. Those themes of imitation, manipulation, and hidden recognition are heightened in Mouth to Mouth. Like the description of a sliver of clear glass on an otherwise frosted door in the lounge, Wilson offers the reader just “a strip of transparency in a field of translucency” about what is motivating his characters to make the choices they do. 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.