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

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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. At least this is the story as he tells it, as he begins to first stalk the man, then takes a job working for him, finds out more about his business dealings and begins to question all he finds out. And yes I suppose it's also about the way every generation becomes what it starts out hating, about the way we construct narratives of our lives that we may or may not actually believe ourselves, about the dangers of being young and aimless and easily dazzled. 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.

I sat at the gate at JFK, having red-eyed my way from Los Angeles, exhausted, minding my own business, reflecting on what I’d seen the night before, shortly after takeoff, shortly before sleep, something I’d never seen before from an airplane.This knowledge is not enough for Cook he wants to know who this man is and was it a life worth saving.

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.As he slowly gets more and more involved in this man's life his judgments and motivations become more and more murky.

I should also mention that this book utilizes one of my favorite plot devices: Cliffhanging chapters, done perfectly! Upstairs, the hallway was anonymous and bland, but the apartment had a distinctive grotto-like atmosphere, the windows covered over with bedsheets and the walls festooned with posters, all of them for the same band, a band I had never heard of: Marillion.

At the end of the novel, after an emotionally turbulent chain of events, Wilson seems to tie up all loose ends. It is a book that plays with the reader a little, which I always appreciate, the narration from Jeff being undercut regularly by our actual narrator, who comes to the forefront and then retreats again many times. In a landscape of literary fiction trending towards navel-gazing, it's a delight to read a pacy story, well told.