Mouth to Mouth: Antoine Wilson

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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. Our narrator begins to really wonder about Jeff. Why is he telling someone he barely knows, an acquaintance from college 20 years ago, this personal story he's never told anyone else? Or so he says... literally nothing happened in this. the narrator meets his old classmate Jeff who tells him the story about how he saved another man's life, subsequently becoming obsessed with him and coincidentally✨ inserting himself into his life

I was thinking about how a sight that might consume our attention completely on the ground could, from another perspective, barely register as a blip on an enormous field, when I heard a name over the PA. 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.”The story is so full of holes and implausibilities that I’m surprised I read to the end. It was very well written, and I did enjoy it at times. I suppose I thought there might be some enlightenment at the end. But there wasn’t. Jeff reveals how preformed CPR and ultimately saved the life of a drowning man. After the rescue, Jeff became preoccupied with finding out more about the man he revived. He discovers the man he saved was prominent art dealer Francis Arsenault. Jeff’s obsession leads him to secure employment at Francis’s art gallery. 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

I presumed that he was one of those people who hated being alone. Perhaps if I’d been paying closer attention, or if I’d known what was to come, I’d have detected a glimmer of desperation in his eyes. I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t there, not yet. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It was he. But Jeff had had famously long, dark flowing hair, not this cropped salt-and-pepper business. Plus he’d put on weight, become more solid in the way so many of us did after college, continuing to grow into manhood long after we thought we’d arrived. 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! 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.” 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? 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.

Once in the lounge, Jeff begins to share his story about how his life dramatically changes after rescuing a drowning man. He goes into great detail about the man he saves being a famous art dealer who eventually takes Jeff under his wing. Jeff strolled up, two beers in hand. He put one in front of me, announcing that he’d found a nonalcoholic brew, and that he wasn’t sure if I drank them, but he thought it might make things feel more ceremonial—that was the word he used—for us to catch up over a couple of beers, alcoholic or not, for old times’ sake. We had never drunk together that I could remember, but I let it go. We clinked bottles and sipped, our eyes turning to the plane traffic outside. 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.

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Rarely does an audio book keep me up, I usually doze off spending my morning hours trying to figure out where in the book to begin again. But at midnight I had to reluctantly turn this audio off and save the end for my morning walk. I had managed to listen to the first three hours and knew it was only becoming more and more difficult to hit the stop key. Someone should do that for us in economy,” I said. “You could fit a lot more people on every flight. Sardine style.” Mouth to Mouth tells the tale of an author whom awaiting his flight to Germany — amidst chasing a hole that he’d become somewhat of a Cult-status author, has a chance encounter with an old College acquaintance, whom winds up sharing a story of his life that throws the author and readers through a very eerily, strange yet poignant loop. 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.” 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

Why yes, I did just include a masturbatory gif on a former President’s book choice. Keepin’ it classy!) Marooned at JFK in between flights from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, our nameless narrator hears a name over the loudspeaker. It’s Jeff Cook, a fellow UCLA alum who stands out in the narrator’s mind despite their barely being acquaintances. Formerly a “thrift-store Adonis,” Jeff now embodies a familiar relationship with luxury, and after a warm reintroduction to the narrator, he invites him to the first-class lounge. Seated by the window drinking the bar’s complimentary beers, Jeff begins to recount a dramatic turning point in his life. One day before dawn, fresh from a breakup with his college girlfriend, he drove to the beach, where he happened to see a man floating facedown and motionless in the early morning surf. He saves his life, and the man is whisked away by paramedics. Once stagnant, Jeff becomes fixated on the person he will learn is Francis Arsenault, a notorious, high-powered art dealer in Beverly Hills. His obsession leads him to a receptionist job at Francis’s gallery, setting off a series of favors, chance encounters, and deceptions that leave the narrator—and the reader—second-guessing all that came before. Francis doesn’t seem to recognize Jeff, however, he sees something in Jeff that makes him become sort of a mentor for him. Francis shows him the ropes of the art world, and Jeff seems to flourish. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. This is the story of two old acquaintances meeting for a flight at JFK airport lounge. Jeff Cook will tell a story that happened to him and changed his life. One day on the beach he rescued a man from drowning. He performed the CPR on that drowned man (that’s the reason this novel is titled Mouth to Mouth). But later he gets obsessed with that man and has to know whether he rescued a good man or made the world a big disservice by letting a monster stay alive.I've seen a fair bit of buzz about Mouth to Mouth and noticed that it received a positive review from Kirkus, but having read it now, I really don't understand why. The central figure Jeff goes to work for LA art dealer Francis Arsenault, an enigmatic power-broker. Jeff knows nothing about art or art dealing or, frankly, anything: a recent graduate of UCLA, he falls in love w Arsenault's daughter, and everything is just fine until she learns that Daddy promised a young femme artist a show in return for a screw. Her art is bad. Daughter has an all-American hissy-fit. ~~ Tant pis! Waiting for a flight at JFK airport lounge, two former classmates reunite, and one of them, Jeff Cook goes into a storytelling mode and shares a story that he has never told before. Its a story that changed the course of two lives, his and the man he saved from drowning. You know, there are books that leave the reader with questions at the end. And then there are books like this one, that leave you feeling maybe the author couldn’t figure it out either! Maybe he’d left it this way hoping readers would be satisfied. But this reader was not.🙄