Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson
Wilson's Mouth to Mouth starts in the JFK airport lounge, when two college acquaintances bump into each other and catch up on what's been happening in the intervening decades, sort of. Now in their 40s, one is clearly a successful business man of a kind and the other is a rather shabby writer. The latter is just as clearly a stand-in for Wilson and his own self-portrait, or at the very least the image of himself he hopes to project.
Wilson does have a strong sense of his characters. They are at least fully realized in the sense that what is needed for the story makes it onto the page from this group of crafted people.
The unnamed author narrator and Jeff Cook sit down while Jeff recounts what basically amounts to a faux-humble, rise-to-success story that begins when Jeff saves a drowning man back in the early 90s when he was fresh from UCLA. After the harrowing event, Jeff is shaken and seemingly looks for closure, searching for the man whose life he saved. That man is art dealer Francis Arsenault, who, through events orchestrated by Jeff, soon becomes his boss. Francis doesn't seem to recognize that it was Jeff who saved his life, and Jeff waffles between hoping to be discovered as the life-saving rescuer and wanting to continue without Francis finding out. Jeff begins dating Francis's daughter Chloe — who failed to introduce herself as such when they met — and his relationship with Francis and at the gallery widens towards the life we know he'll eventually have.
Wilson returns the narrative again and again to the airport lounge, hoping to maintain the pretense of this all happening through a conversation. As this little novel continues along its merry way, doing what it will, that setup barely maintains control. In these little remember-this-is-a-conversation blips, the author character questions why he's being told this story that Jeff has apparently never told to another soul, and tries to prompt and steer the life story...but Jeff is that one person you bump into who insists on not being rushed through a story no one really wants to hear, buffeting the interference with responses like, "I'll get to that," or, "Stick with me here."
I presume the pull of this novel is the wondering whether Francis will ever find out and if so (or when) what will he do with this information. Will he see it as deception? And yet, here sits Jeff — a fully successful member of the art world — with his condescending tone barely in check, and the inevitability of the plot, and its reveal, hurling toward us. I must admit I was absolutely stunned to see this one, in several critical reviews, be referred to as a thriller. I found the whole experience increasingly boring. While the opening was fairly intriguing, along with the idea that the novel isn't even 200 pages, the sheer certainty of what was to come (and not a second before that final sentence) was so clear to me that I was surprised to find it was bored with the plot and construction that I barely could coax myself into picking it back up. It took me two weeks to the day before I could just push through with the mindset of just finishing it rather than it being about reading a book.
There is also the question of the reliability of Jeff as the narrator of his own life's snapshot and honestly he was so obviously such a bullshit artist from the get-go that I wanted the author narrator to get up out of frustration and leave. Maybe I should've left without him.
