Funny, Moving, Inventive, Weird

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	• The Mayor's Tongue Nathaniel Rich Riverhead Hardcover, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Wow is this a weird book

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.

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Funny, Moving, Inventive, 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.

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Finally, a Daring Debut

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.

A stunningly original novel of literary obsession and imagination that is sure to be one of the most highly anticipated debuts of the year.

From a precociously talented young writer already widely admired in the literary world, The Mayor?s Tongue is a bold, vertiginous debut novel that unfolds in two complementary narratives, one following a young man and the other an old man. The young man is Eugene Brentani, aflame with a passion for literature and language, and a devotee of the reclusive author and adventurer Constance Eakins, now living in Italy. The old man is Mr. Schmitz, whose wife is dying, and, confused and terrified, he longs to confide in his dear friend Rutherford. But Rutherford has disappeared, and his letters, postmarked from Italy, become more and more ominous as the weeks pass.

In separate but resonating story lines, both men?s adventures take them from New York City to the mountainous borderlands of northern Italy, where the line between reality and imagination begins to blur and stories take on a life of their own. Here, we are immersed in Rich?s vivid, enchanting world full of captivating characters? the despairing Enzo, who wanders looking for a nameless love; the tiny, doll-like guide, Lang; and the grotesque Eakins. Over this strange, spectral landscape looms the Mayor, a mythic and monstrous figure considered a ?beautiful creator? by his townspeople, whose pull ultimately becomes irresistible.

From a young writer of exceptional promise, this refreshingly original novel is a meditation on the frustrations of love, the madness of mayors, the failings of language, and the transformative powers of storytelling.

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