Why yes, I did just include a masturbatory gif on a former President’s book choice. Keepin’ it classy!)

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. 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. 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." 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 character of Francis emerges powerfully and he isn’t one that’s easy to like but we’ve only got Jeff’s word for that especially as you see it’s a sort of the King is dead, Long live the King kind of story. The twist at the end is excellent and one which you don’t see coming. I’ll keep weighing that up!

Need Help?

I’d said it before and meant it every time, but people always took it as an expression of false modesty.

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. A flight delay from JFK to Berlin was perfect for passing the time conversing with a fellow passenger. They were barely acquainted as college students at UCLA, 20 years prior. Jeff Cook, smartly dressed for success, asked our narrator to join him in the first class lounge to await the Berlin flight announcement. Jeff was a successful art dealer. The narrator would be traveling to Berlin, at his own expense, to drum up interest in his writing. Francis Arsenault Fine Arts was located in Beverly Hills, Jeff recounted wanting to see the stranger whose life he saved. "I didn't want it to seem like I had come to collect anything...You don't save someone's life to collect a reward." If that be the case, why accept a job at the gallery and start to become indispensable to Francis?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. Mouth to Mouth opens with the narrator reflecting on his recent red-eye. Soon after that, he and Jeff Cook reunite, and the latter shares a story of a woman who only flies unconscious, as well as his feelings about going under general anesthesia for a surgery. How do the themes of these narratives—and the rest of the lead-up to Jeff’s saga, including the narrator’s memories and observations—echo throughout the novel? 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. 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. 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.

So set aside a few hours this winter. Get a cup of your favorite beverage, settle in your favorite chair. You won’t want to set this book down.

Table of Contents

Someone should do that for us in economy,” I said. “You could fit a lot more people on every flight. Sardine style.” Funny you should say that,” Jeff said, as if he hadn’t just nudged the conversation in that direction. “I ended up in close proximity to one once. Not long after college, in fact, a year or so later. I was, through no planning or forethought on my part, responsible for saving a man’s life.”

Joan Didion, who died Thursday, left a seismic impact on the literary world and her home state of California. Put together a list of other novels that explore art, identity, corruption, and the tangled webs we weave, and discuss how these selections connect to Mouth to Mouth. How does form affect your reading? What did you appreciate about Wilson’s approach? Although the central drama of Mouth to Mouth is between Jeff and Francis (and arguably the narrator), other characters—specifically women—play a major part in the book. In what ways do G, Chloe, Alison, and Astrid affect the trajectory of the plot? How do they each exercise control? 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 A] taut, compulsive chamber piece of a novel, which you’ll struggle not to rip through in one sitting… Mouth to Mouth is an elegantly told and supremely gripping tale of serendipity and deception—and delivers a brilliant ending that will leave you guessing about everything that came before.” — Vogueliterally 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 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. He is a contributing editor of the literary journal A Public Space as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, Quarterly West, and Best New American Voices, among other publications. 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. Arsenault’s life becomes complicated, threatening to divide his family, and he presses Cook for loyalty. It becomes a deadly game.