Mouth to Mouth: Antoine Wilson

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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. 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

She had been "...the first thing he thought of upon waking and the last he thought of before sleep descended". They had broken up. The beach parking lot was empty before sunrise. "The immensity of the ocean...[he stepped] barefoot on the cold sand, feeling a sense of liberation at his own insignificance." "Out of the corner of his eye-a dark form on the surface of the water-a swimmer making for shore...something was wrong...He knew with certainty that the crisis at hand was his alone to handle...one's interceding or not could equally represent fate." A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. The flight delay becomes protracted (they’re both booked on the same flight, albeit at different ends of the aeroplane) and as the two men talk on more of Cook’s story is revealed. What follows is a tale of scheming, betrayal and fateful events. The interaction between the pair is really well handled, in fact the writing is first rate throughout. He’s a clever guy, the author, and I was constantly looking up words I didn’t recognise and references I didn’t understand the meaning of. The pacing is excellent too and as I got close to the end I was waiting for the final punch – it came late and it was pretty good, that’s all I’ll say.

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I’m going to put it out there immediately that many people will not like this book. The premise here is our narrator runs into an old college acquaintance . . . Dealers do fool around w artists...yes, but only w the "good" ones; sometimes, so do art critics. (The NYT--for years--had a critic who "made" a young woman a Star.) ~ However, I've never ever been to an art opening that played canned music, which is done at the Arsenault Gallery in LA. Jeff, starting at the gallery on the lowest level, would be getting minimum pay. This doesnt bother him as he's house-sitting for Brad Pitt. His job is, frankly, the most boring in the world. At another opening he meets the great minimalist Agnes Martin. He doesnt "get" her work. But Arsenault believes Jeff has "an eye." all good old Jeff does is to keep going on about "Was it fate?" "He never really thanked me." and blabla. he's not even good at story telling. i wanted to be on the edge of my seat, instead i fell asleep listening to the audiobook

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. He had undergone surgery recently, nothing serious, or not life-threatening at least, but he had ended up terrified that he wouldn’t wake up again. It did happen to people. And though such accidents had become exceedingly rare, he couldn’t help but imagine his going to sleep and never waking up, what it would do to his children—he had two as well—and to his wife. The whole episode had disturbed him greatly.A novel about delusions of grandeur, and their deathly consequences: At JFK airport, the unnamed narrator, a writer, meets a former UCLA classmate who invites him to the first class lounge and feels compelled to tell him his life story. This sets in motion the story-within-a-story structure, in which we learn that the classmate, Jeff, has saved a man's life (via mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but the book title of course also refers to oral storytelling), and then became obsessed with this very man, aiming to find out what he did with his second chance. Turns out the man is a wealthy art dealer named Francis, and Jeff wiggles his way into his life, becoming his assistant and dating his daughter. 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... Compare and contrast airport-lounge Jeff with younger Jeff. What adjectives would you use to describe him? Can you pinpoint moments when the younger Jeff starts to resemble present-day Jeff? Even if Jeff was obscuring the ways in which he and Francis are similar, can you identify traits the two men might share?

A story told within a story and one that at first glance may not seem all that interesting. It's an ARC I've had for months that I continued to pass over in my search of the next great book. Realizing that the publishing date was coming up soon I figured I could slip in one last novel into my 2021 reading journey and so chose Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson. What a surprise this was. I was absolutely captivated by this slow simmering story. Antoine Wilson writes with such eloquence it's to be admired. I should also mention that this book utilizes one of my favorite plot devices: Cliffhanging chapters, done perfectly! I would no sooner finish a chapter when that "just one more" mantra would start blaring through my brain. And that ending... Chefs kiss! 👌 Highly recommend! 4 stars!

Table of Contents

Antoine Wilson is the author of the the forthcoming novel Mouth to Mouth, coming in 2022 from Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster), and the novels The Interloper and Panorama City, from Other Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, respectively. I was in the mood for something different but I didn't expect this short audiobook to be as good as it was! It starts slow, meanders for a while, and then it takes you to a surprise ending. I did not see that one coming! 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 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... As Cook talked the writer took on the role of confessor, his responses sympathetic and occasionally prompting. Not that Cook needed much prompting, he’s on a roll and seems determined to provide an unexpurgated version. The start point, and the key to all that follows, is his intervention one morning when spots a man in severe difficulty off Santa Monica beach. Without further thought, he launches himself into the water and swims out to the man. Having rescued him from certain drowning others arrive on the scene and eventually he’s left alone, with no knowledge of the identity of the man he saved. Initially this doesn’t bother him, he’s done a good deed and that’s all that matters. But after stewing in his own juices for a while his curiosity gets the better of him – he needs to know more.

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. 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 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. It knows what it wants to say, it's efficient, and if it maybe hits the nail on the head a bit more than is my personal preference, it was never really going for subtlety anyway. I’d said it before and meant it every time, but people always took it as an expression of false modesty. Our narrator is uncertain why he has been chosen to hear Cook’s story, especially since Cook insists it is because he was ‘there at the beginning’ although they were not imitate friends. Our confidence man noticed Cook on campus, and there were in a college art class. But never friends.Now that we've finished all that, I just found myself wondering what the point was when it was all over. Not what was the point of the book, that was quite clear and as I mentioned it was effectively made. But why tell this story when it has, frankly, been told so many times already? The chapters are short and fly by. Expert foreshadowing lets you know that the end is not likely to have been a good one for either the saved man or the savior. This seems such a simple tale when you begin it but it isn’t. This is one to continue to think about and it kind of gets under your skin. A delayed flight at JFK reunited two college classmates. As they wait for their flight in the first class lounge they exchange pleasantries. Then one of the friends, Jeff Cook begins to share an account of an important event that changed the course of his life. Consider if, instead of the narrator mediating Jeff’s story, Wilson wrote Mouth to Mouth only from Jeff’s perspective. Does the inclusion of a narrator make it easier or more difficult to form your own opinions? Do you find him trustworthy?