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

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I rose and made my way past a variety of travelers, from business types to trust fund hipsters, many of them speaking foreign languages. 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. I found Mouth To Mouth rather compelling reading, but I’m not quite sure what it added up to in the end.

Now that we've finished all that, I just found myself wondering what the point was when it was all over. 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. As he kills time at the gate, he bumps into a former classmate of his, Jeff, who is waiting for the same flight. 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. I had to see how things played out for Jeff, with a constant sense of hesitancy about what was to come.Their lives appear to be eerily interconnected—and the narrative Jeff spins blurs the lines between fiction and reality. When Jeff becomes involved with Francis’ daughter, he finally comes to his boss’ notice but still no revelation of what has brought them together is made.

Cook stalks Arsenault, discovering he is a wealthy art dealer, and has a clandestine meetings with a mistress. This is one of those books that starts off with an intriguing premise that draws you in right away, after which the whole thing becomes a trudge. The First-Class-Lounge setting at an airport is the excellently-utilised vessel for this odd and incredibly well-told story of a man who saves another’s life, then becomes fixated on what the consequences of that act will be, albeit without ever “intending” to do any of it.Cook questions the life guard who came to the scene and learns the drowned man’s name–Frances Arsenault. Then one of the friends, Jeff Cook begins to share an account of an important event that changed the course of his life. 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. But after stewing in his own juices for a while his curiosity gets the better of him – he needs to know more.

I’d said it before and meant it every time, but people always took it as an expression of false modesty. At a time when any book that could be potentially categorized as a sort of "mystery or thriller" tends to be all about how much shock and awe or twists and turns can be contained with its pages, it was a breath of fresh air to read such a delicious sleeper like this. I’d been on the left side of the plane, and we’d gone south over the ocean, accident of fate, affording me a panoramic view of the city at night: amber streetlights dotting neighborhoods; red-stripe, white-stripe garlands of freeway traffic; mysterious black gaps of waterways and parkland.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. Speaking the man’s name, he is surprised to be happily embraced as an old friend, as someone who knew him ‘then. We learn that he’s travelling cheaply, but having already caught a redeye from the West Coast to JFK, New York he’s now learned that his onward flight has been delayed. Inspired by Somerset Maugham, the author tells his story as a told-to-me in an airport lounge during a flight delay.

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 .For Jeff Cook this responsibility plays out in a most unusual way and much is left to the reader's interpretation. But Jeff is not all too pleased with the way Francis spends the part of his life he enabled him to have by saving him.