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

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Jeff Cook, smartly dressed for success, asked our narrator to join him in the first class lounge to await the Berlin flight announcement. This leads him into both the man’s art-dealing business and then his personal life, making him think about the consequences of having saved a life when that life may not be a very commendable one. 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.

It’s a very well written and involving tale which is also lent a certain Hitchcockian creepiness by the chance encounter and the other-worldly airport lounge setting. Much like he did for his characters, Wilson employs detailed descriptions of the Los Angeles art scene to make the atmosphere tangible. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The narrator is clearly judging Jeff as well – as I mentioned above, Jeff clearly doesn’t care about the narrator or his thoughts, he just wants to tell this story, even other people in the airport lounge remark on how annoying Jeff must be as he’s flapping his gums with no end in sight.The man takes him into the First Class Lounge and over drinks spins a wondrous tale of loss, unthinking heroism, and unsought riches. I rose and made my way past a variety of travelers, from business types to trust fund hipsters, many of them speaking foreign languages. Eventually Francis came around, but would only tell people he’d broken the ribs in a “squash accident”. He manages with much personal effort of CPR to bring the man back to life before Medics arrive and carry him off. Sly, suspenseful, and engrossing, Mouth to Mouth masterfully blurs the line between opportunity and exploitation, self-respect and self-delusion, fact and fiction—exposing the myriad ways we deceive each other, and ourselves.

He said his name to the gate agent and slid his boarding pass and identification across the counter. There is space for doubt to creep into their minds as to whether his motivations are genuine and virtuous. He is a contributing editor of the literary journal A Public Space as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books. 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. We occasionally hear an internal thought or judgement from the narrator about Jeff, his suspicions begins to grow about why he’s being told all this (and really, won’t this guy ever shut up?But after stewing in his own juices for a while his curiosity gets the better of him – he needs to know more.