What a delightfully clever story Mouth to Mouth is — The unnamed narrator bumps into his former college acquaintance, Jeff, at the airport. You keep reading in hopes that there will be a big payoff, but it never quite lives up to the promising start. Knowing this world very well, w a close chum who was a NY art dealer for decades, and another pal who has assisted in 3 major NYC galleries, along w many artist friends, in NYC and Los Angeles, I cannot take this melodrama seriously -- or as satire, which may be its failed aim.

Jeff becomes a little obsessed with this man he has saved and worms his way into his life, which at times is a bit unsettling. I know a woman,” he said, “friend of a friend, you could say, who is terrified of flying but has to travel to various places every year for family obligations. Wish it had gone more into art world money laundering but that's only a really minor complaint because the novel's pretty much perfect as it is. 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.

The device of one man unburdening himself to another works beautifully for this expertly spun story which might be a confessional or might not.

The description of Cook performing CPR is incredibly visceral, exemplifying Wilson’s ability to appeal to the senses. While waiting, Jeff decides to unload his burden, his story of how he became so financially successful.

Jeff becomes obsessed with this man whose life he’s saved, tracking down his identity, spending days observing him, not quite plucking up the courage to reveal himself. Kind of a joke on the concept of airport novels, given that it takes place entirely in an airport lounge, a tale told between friends who happen to run into each other while their flight to Germany is delayed by the Icelandic volcano.

Perhaps it will be more engaging to those readers who enjoy reading about art curators and art galleries. The plot picks up pace as Jeff insinuates himself into Francis’s life, and the more dramatic Francis’s life reveals itself to be, the faster everything moves, us hearing less and less from the narrator, everything eventually overtaken by Jeff’s story. Insisting that his former classmate’s “appearing out of nowhere must have sparked some old circuitry” in his brain, Cook recounts how, in his early 20s, he brought a drowned man back to life on Santa Monica beach. A delayed flight and a chance encounter at JFK with a former classmate,Jeff Cook, with whom our narrator attended UCLA 20 years ago.At a time when any book that could be potentially categorized as a sort of "mystery or thriller" tends to be all about how much shock and awe or twists and turns can be contained with its pages, it was a breath of fresh air to read such a delicious sleeper like this. I had to see how things played out for Jeff, with a constant sense of hesitancy about what was to come. Even though Francis seems to have no recollection of the incident, he takes Jeff under his wing, and Jeff becomes increasingly involved in Francis’s life, dating his daughter and attending important art world parties. If I had been reading a physical copy and not the audiobook on my commute, I imagine I would have given up. 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 First-Class-Lounge setting at an airport is the excellently-utilised vessel for this odd and incredibly well-told story of a man who saves another’s life, then becomes fixated on what the consequences of that act will be, albeit without ever “intending” to do any of it. I kept reading and reading to get to the promised twist that everyone has been raving about, but, honestly, the biggest surprise for me is that the ending surprised anyone. I just want you to keep in mind that what we see, what we think we see, I should say, is always changed by the words in our heads,” the narrator of “Panorama City” says in a message to his unborn son. But the focus of story now switched as Cook began to tell of a pivotal event earlier in his life, something he’s never talked of to another living soul. I just wanted him to be good, though, I wanted to feel that I had done a good thing not only for him but for all the people he came into contact with.Their lives appear to be eerily interconnected—and the narrative Jeff spins blurs the lines between fiction and reality. Alone on the beach one morning, Jeff notices a swimmer drowning in the rough surf - and so he rescues and resuscitates the unconscious man, before leaving him to the emergency services. I thoroughly enjoy this character driven novella (about 200 pages long) which is extremely well written and immersive as you come to appreciate its entertaining cleverness. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Born in Montreal and raised in Central and Southern California as well as Saudi Arabia, he now lives with his family in Los Angeles.