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

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I rose and made my way past a variety of travelers, from business types to trust fund hipsters, many of them speaking foreign languages.

More chitchat follows, the two exchange a couple of faded college memories, and then, with obvious calculation, Cook launches into the story — a confession, really — that will dominate the remainder of the men’s time in airport limbo as well as this brisk novel’s 65 chapters, some covering no more than a page.

What a delightfully clever story Mouth to Mouth is — The unnamed narrator bumps into his former college acquaintance, Jeff, at the airport.

He said his name to the gate agent and slid his boarding pass and identification across the counter. The reader is left to judge if Jeff was an opportunistic jerk exploiting the dealer, who is a jerk himself. But Jeff can’t let go of the events of that traumatic day and he begins to feel compelled to learn more about the man whose life he has saved.Unexpectedly traumatized by the event, Jeff develops a fixation on the man he saved, sure that they are now inextricably linked. Both are flying to Berlin and when their flight is delayed they sit in the first-class lounge and get caught up. 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. As Wilson brings his work to its rapid-paced conclusion, he—like a pilot doing everything he can to stick a tight landing—jettisons everything that is not absolutely necessary to the plot so that he can reach his conclusion at the right time, with the right force.

I wouldn’t have read it otherwise, but I still wish I somehow could have not known that the last sentence would be something surprising.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Upstairs, the hallway was anonymous and bland, but the apartment had a distinctive grotto-like atmosphere, the windows covered over with bedsheets and the walls festooned with posters, all of them for the same band, a band I had never heard of: Marillion.

The dialogue in these scenes is also impressively realistic, as though Wilson had transcribed real-life conversations. After college, Cook explains, his girlfriend dumped him and broke his heart, and one night he wandered to the sea alone. The characters jump off the page, engaging in a natural flow of conversation and reacting to situations with a range of physical movements, facial expressions, and emotions. The end papers are a beautifully coloured pattern of clouds, but the vibrant green cover almost misrepresents what’s in between the covers – it’s a dark look at what drives us, and how we weigh our own moral decisions and dilemmas.