The Mayor's Tongue

Eugene is a mover in New York City whose favorite author is Constance Eakins. While doing a job one day, he runs into a biographer of Eakins who also happens to have a beautiful daughter, Sonia. Everyone else in the world believes Eakins is dead -- that he just disappeared in Italy quite a few years back and never showed up again. He's legally declared dead by the Italian authorities. Sonia's father, the biographer, demands that it isn't so -- that his daughter speaks to Eakins regularly. But, no one has heard from her after her latest trip to Italy. Eugene decides to look for Sonia. Meanwhile in a parallel story, an elderly Mr. Schmitz, also a New Yorker, is grieving the loss of his friend Rutherford who has just moved to Italy. He receives lucid letters from Rutherford at first, but then they become more and more incomprehensible. Schmitz also decides to take off for Italy to look for his friend. This was a bizarre story that was unique enough to keep me reading and wanting to find out more. The book has quite a few fantasy elements too, and that was unexpected, but it certainly added to the story. It's definitely a different book. This is Nathaniel Rich's first novel.

I picked up this book along with Keith Gessen's book (about with the less said the better) based on an LA Times story about young New York literary editors and their brand new novels. From the story I was expecting a book in the sort of early Roth or Bellow vein of brilliant if self-indulgent navel-gazing (for that, see Gessen) - but it turns out this is the craziest novel I've read since reading Calvino and Borges in college. It starts out with a post-collegiate guy in New York kind of annoyingly trying to find himself through manual labor, working as a mover, but as soon as you realize his moving partner is some kind of mad Dominican shape-shifter, the book just cuts loose into a quasi-surreal quest around the world in pursuit of a demagogic writer (who seemed to be based on Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway, but with a good does of Pynchon & Salinger mystery about him). It becomes this really delightful, sometimes melancholy novel about desperate love and literary obsession and really, really trying to communicate. All of which are things I feel like I know a little too much about - and seeing them treated so well and so creatively here got me more excited about a new writer than I have been for a long time. Weird or not, though I like weird.

I first became aware of Nathaniel Rich when I read his brilliant piece on Pier Paolo Pasolini in the New York Review of Books (9/27/2007). It's the only piece the NYRB has ever published on Pasolini, and that said something important to me. The NYRB doesn't mess around. So I kept my eye out for him after that, and he rarely, if ever, disapointed. A great piece on Will Self in the New York Times Book Review comes to mind, as well as some great interviews -- with J.T. Leroy and Stephen King -- in the Paris Review. And if you like film noir, as I do, his book on San Francisco Noir is a gem. But with this book, the Mayor's Tongue, he takes his talent to a new level. This kid Rich -- what is he, 25? 26? -- writes like a man twice his age. When he takes you up the cliffs of northern Italy, your palms will get sweaty. And when he riffs his way through the history of the insurance business in Hartford, seemingly ad-libbing his way back to the early 19th century, you will laugh your head off and wonder: is this stuff true? Or is he making this up? Or both? This book is funny and moving and crazy and inventive and weird, weird in the good way, the way that keeps you up at night wondering what all his fantastic characters -- dozens of them! -- are doing right now, where they're hiding, who they're sleeping with. I'll never forget Mr. Schmitz. Mr. Schmitz will stay with me forever.

I'm not sure this is the best novel Mr. Rich is going to write, but it's pretty damn good. He takes some chances with narrative and plot and character development and succeeds nearly every time. This is a novel worth taking a chance on. One thing is for sure, his dad could never pen something so inventive.