Two parallel missing person searches hurtle from New York to Italy in
Paris Review editor Rich's surreal debut. Eugene Brentani, avoiding his lonely father and Sutton Place upbringing just after college, ends up in far Northern Manhattan working for Abraham Chisholm, the biographer of Connie Eakins—the author on whom Eugene wrote his college thesis. Abraham's lovely daughter, Sonia, goes missing in Italy while searching for the presumed-dead Eakins; Eugene, who met Sonia in New York and fell instantly in love with her, jumps at the opportunity to retrieve her. Once in Milan, Eugene finds danger lurking around every corner. Alternating chapters tell of elderly New York widower Mr. Schmitz (as he's called throughout), whose friend Rutherford has left for Italy, and whose letters from there are troubling. Mr. Schmitz sets off for Milan, partially to help Rutherford reclaim the Italy the two men knew as WWII soldiers. Rich seems as interested in exploring different forms of miscommunication as in developing character and plot, and the two central mysteries, both centering on books and story-telling, have a distinctly Borgesian flavor to them. Rich is an impressive stylist, but this debut's whole ends up less than the sum of its disparate parts, which a surprise ending fails to unify.
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“In this tale about the obsessive relationship between a writer and his voice, Nathaniel Rich finds his own.”
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Men’s Vogue "Rich delivers a daring, wonderfully weird first novel. The book is divided into two narratives...The stories never cross explicitly, but an electricity arcs between them, inducing an effect as haunting as the reality-collapsing yarns of Paul Auster."
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Interview “Imaginatively folkloric...the experience of sharing in its feverish tussling with ideas is consistently exuberant.”
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The Los Angeles Times Book Review “When Rich writes of his characters, their affections, their impulses and failings, he writes generously and movingly...Surprising friendships, small intimacies of fidelity and kindness, large gestures of joy:
The Mayor’s Tongue does all these so well, pointing the way to Nathaniel Rich’s promise as a fiction writer.”
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The New York Times Book Review “The effort of an extremely strong writer.
The Mayor's Tongue is going to invite heady literary comparisons (Borges, Calvino; let's add Flann O'Brien)...Rich is on his way.”
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Newsday “
The Mayor's Tongue is a playful, highly intellectual novel about serious subjects -- the failure of language, for one, and how we cope with that failure in order to keep ourselves sane.”
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The Washington Post “
The Mayor's Tongue is a spare masterpiece of postmodernism, an incisive fable whose myriad threads of plot and thought take the inhibitions of our era to task and make Rich's first novel a New York Trilogy for the new millennium.”
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Blogcritics Magazine “Nathaniel Rich’s beguiling debut novel,
The Mayor’s Tongue, is a welcome reminder that experimental fiction can have a sense of play and emotional depth without becoming a stage for showoff-y acrobatics…[Rich] securely nails down the thematic tent poles of his story—the difficulty of locating what we love most, the role of storytelling in our lives, and the way language confuses as much as it connects.”
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Washington City Paper “Imaginatively folkloric…the experience of sharing in [the book’s] feverish tussling with ideas is consistently exuberant. The Mayor's Tongue will resonate with readers who sometimes feel more substantial inside the labyrinth of imagination than in any ‘real world’ encounters.”
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Los Angeles Times “Rich has stuffed this marvelously strange debut novel to the breaking point. It gets through two or three promising false starts before the real narrative takes hold, and the abandoned plotlines are less distractions than an embarrassment of creative riches. A dozen stories seethe within the skin of this one, a novel that blends the impersonal beauties of folktale with the very personal quest of its youthful, angsty protagonist.”
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Time Out Chicago “Shockingly strong debut from gifted writer... There is little beyond exuberance to betray
The Mayor’s Tongue as a debut novel…Rich demonstrates an almost impish delight in confounding rather than elucidating, systematically disfiguring the barrier between fiction and reality…The novel’s foremost delight is its measured, nearly imperceptible descent into the realm of fairy-tale. There is no rabbit hole to fall through—reality and fairy-tale co-exist, sharing the same borders, the same characters, and the same heartbreak for jilted lovers.”
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Paste Magazine “Nathaniel Rich's first novel is a coming-of-age story like Pinocchio in reverse: Instead of growing up to become a real boy, the hero of The Mayor’s Tongue grows up to find out that he's not real at all. If you're a Pynchon or Fowles fan, it's a novel for you.”
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San Francisco Chronicle “Few American fiction debuts in recent years have thumbed their noses at literary convention like Nathaniel Rich’s
The Mayor’s Tongue: Its serio- comic blending of the real and the fantastic often recalls Stanley Elkin’s early work.”
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Time Out New York “A highly entertaining, erudite book.”
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The Dallas Morning News "Rich’s strangely hypnotic novel, brimming with fantastical figures, gently pulls readers into its orbit."
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Booklist "Nathaniel Rich has written an intoxicating fairy tale...[He] challenges the reader to leave behind the world they know and understand and walk alongside changeling guides through a foreign landscape. It's a bit like watching an early David Lynch film, trying to discern an objective reality in a world engulfed with hallucinations, deception, and the blindness of love."
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The Buffalo News "I read
The Mayor's Tongue with ever-increasing delight, rooting with all my heart for the young protagonist on his near-mythic quest. This is an elegantly-structured, brilliantly-told novel, by turns terrifying, touching, and wildly funny, and always generous and magical.
The Mayor's Tongue is about how we talk to each other and how make-believe helps us get on with our lives; most of all, it's about love. Kudos to Nathaniel Rich, who has created a brave book, a novel brimming with brio."
-Stephen King
“Ambitious, intelligent, hallucinatory, and, most important: heartfelt. Here is a young writer who is not afraid to give literature a kick in the pants, a writer deep in the thrall of language.”
—Gary Shteyngart
"
The Mayor's Tongue reminds me of Peter Carey's early work-the highest possible praise. It presents a young writer of deep ambition and imagination working with a kind of unnerving maturity. It's clear from the very first pages that Nathaniel Rich can really write, and he proceeds to unfurl a fascinating mšbius strip of a novel, its dual narratives swerving and twisting until they've come together in a way that seems all at once impossible and endlessly elegant."
-Colum McCann, author of
Zoli and
This Side of Brightness
