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 Brainstorm some minor characters—for example, Andrea, Saskia, Dennis, and Alex Post. Fill in their lives; what kind of people are they?

After college, Cook explains, his girlfriend dumped him and broke his heart, and one night he wandered to the sea alone. Noticing an arm rising from the water, he was impelled to plunge into the cold sea, bringing the dead weight of the body to land and administering CPR, mouth to mouth. The drowned man recovers. And Cook wonders who the man is, and what difference it makes that he was saved. 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." 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.Coming out of surgery,” he said, “waking up in the recovery room, foggy as hell, I didn’t feel the sense of relief I had expected to feel—that only came later when I saw my family again. I felt like I’d lost a chunk of time. Like sleep, but when you sleep you wake up where you went down. I felt that things had happened to me without my knowledge, which they had, of course, and I was left with the uncanny sense that I wasn’t the same person who had gone under. Time had passed, a part of my body was no longer in me, I had had a square shaved from my leg for some kind of circuit-completing electrode, but I was still I, obviously. Now, this may have been a side effect of the drugs, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d only just arrived in the world, as a replacement for the old me. It wore off, as I said, but it wasn’t a pleasant state.” Cook meets a woman at an art reception and she becomes his lover before she reveals that she is the boss’s daughter. He is finally noticed by Arsenault, still unsure if he had been recognized. And becoming close to Arsenault, he realizes the art business is basically a ‘money laundering scheme,’ with secret sales guaranteed to inflate prices. 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.

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. 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?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. To add fun and interest to the story, Wilson writes the art dealer as an unethical and brutal man. Jeff frequently questions if he was right in saving this unkind man. Jeff is attempting to paint himself as a great person for saving a man’s life, but the narrator asks to what end did he want to be a part of the dealer’s life? Jeff slowly tells his story of his rise to greatness and his relationship with the dealer. The reader is left to judge if Jeff was an opportunistic jerk exploiting the dealer, who is a jerk himself.

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. Jeff is obsessed with his perceived goodness, and he provides few details that make Francis out to be anything other than an asshole. Do you think the novel makes a case for what makes a moral or corrupt person? How does it comment on the human condition? While waiting for a delayed flight to Berlin, Jeff bumped into an old acquaintance from UCLA and the two spent the downtime in the First Class Lounge—Jeff’s treat. For several hours, Jeff related the story, mentioning several times he’d never spoken of the incident to anyone until now. WHY? 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 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! 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 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. Mouth to Mouth" by Antoine Wilson is a fascinating literary novel. It explores the connection between rescuer and survivor and exposes buried secrets. There were many unanswered questions. Were Jeff and Francis good people? Were they users? Was the narrator truly the first person to hear the story? Were Jeff's recollections embellished based upon an audience? Was our narrator reliable? This thought provoking read is one I highly recommend.