The premise of Antoine Wilson’s recent novel “Mouth to Mouth” is simple enough: Two old college acquaintances run into each other in an airport. Their flights are delayed, so they grab a drink to catch up. One begins to tell the other about the time he saved a stranger’s life. What happens next is the unspooling of a tense psychological drama that’s difficult to forget long after you’ve closed the book.

Full disclosure: I thought maybe it was just me who found the story difficult to forget. My own life was actually saved by a stranger more than 20 years ago, an experience so intense I wrote a book about it. I figured perhaps I was uniquely interested in the complex issues that come up when two strangers become enmeshed in a life-or-death situation. Plus, I count Wilson among my personal acquaintances, so I knew I was reading his book while being less than objective.

Related: ‘Mouth to Mouth’ Antoine Wilson on the books that made him a writer

But it doesn’t seem to be just me. Since it was published in January, “Mouth to Mouth” has made it onto local bestseller lists and must-read lists, as well as garnered critical praise largely summed up in this BuzzFeed assessment: “gloriously addicting.” Kirkus Reviews called it “a deliciously nasty morality play in the guise of a thriller.”

Only thing is, Wilson never intended to write a thriller. 

He’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop – which for writers is what Julliard is to musicians, or maybe what The Actor’s Studio is to thespians. Wilson, whose previous novels include “The Interloper” and “Panorama City” and whose writing has appeared in The Paris Review, considers himself a writer of literary fiction, a genre characterized by its use of poetic language, complex ideas and avoidance of formulaic structure. Over coffee via a Zoom meet-up, Wilson and I talked about what led to penning what readers are calling a thriller.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length:

Q. Everybody always wants a novelist to admit their fiction is based on their real life, but in this case, there is some element of truth – didn’t you once save someone’s life?

It’s the power dynamic that interests me here. And also, maybe slightly obscure ethical questions about, you know, what, if you save somebody that turns out to be a total jerk kind of stuff. But the actual spark for the novel was back in ’97. I was visiting Seattle with some friends. We were down by the waterfront and I prevented somebody from walking in front of a freight train. He was just air drumming and walking along, not paying attention to anything. I got his attention and stopped him just before he stepped into the path of a freight train. So then he looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God, you saved my life.’ And then he said, ‘I’m going to buy you a big steak dinner.’ Then the train finished going by and he just kept going on air drumming. And that was it. 

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Q. So no steak dinner.

I thought for a long time about, ‘Where’s my steak dinner?’ [Laughs] Uh, yeah, it wasn’t something that necessarily affected me on a super-deep level. But about 10 years ago, I started wanting to explore that rescuer-rescued relationship. And I started with, What if I played with the steak dinner thing and I turned it into a drowning – because I was swimming a lot at the time. And then actually, the early earliest versions of “Mouth to Mouth” did have the steak dinner.

Q. Through fiction, the wrong was righted!

But it didn’t work at all in the story. But yeah, the rescue thing stayed.

Q. As I’ve told you, I haven’t been able to forget about this book. Part of that is personal – not to take anything away from your skill. I was rescued by a man who literally held my life in his hands – he pinched off my artery and kept me from bleeding to death. And our lives became incredibly enmeshed. For me, this book articulated something that I haven’t seen in other works. 

That makes me very happy because I’m the only person in the world who can’t read this book! That’s my favorite thing about putting something into the world, seeing the different types of ways that people approach a book. And this book is fairly open in terms of its interpretation. Like, how do you want to see [the main character] Jeff Cook? Some readers want to see him as a sociopath and others don’t see him that way.

It just happened to be interpreted as a thriller by some people, but that, wasn’t my aim, you know?

Q. Well, you’re on the bestseller list, locally, at least. So just take it.

[Laughs] Oh, I’ll take it.

Q. A writing question: When did the story start to turn for you? You go through the process of trying to build a book – it works, it doesn’t work, it works, it doesn’t work. Then all of a sudden the voice clicks or the setting clicks or the motivation within a character clicks. What clicked for you that made everything start to work?

The Jeff story was at the core of what I was working on for several years, and I was working on another novel at the same time, serially, abandoning them back and forth in a way that was completely a hundred percent sincere. It was driving my wife [Chris, a screenwriter] insane because I was like, ‘I’m done; this doesn’t work. I just am not doing this book. I’m going to do the other book.’ And then the same thing would happen back and forth. 

But there was something about this story that just really appealed to me, but there was something missing. It was while I was working on the other book that I re-read “Austerlitz” by W. G. Sebald. I freaking love that book, but I hadn’t read it since 2001. So it was now 2017. I picked it up again and I was captivated. Like, everything and nothing is happening. There’s a nameless narrator and another guy whose story it is. That’s probably all the similarities that my books share shares with “Austerlitz,” but there was something about reading that book and his narrative strategy that made me think, OK, maybe I need to put an interlocutor here, a nameless narrator who to whom the story could be told. And then everything clicked into place. That was what I knew that I had a novel. 

Q. That additional layer is where a lot of the action happens because there is that psychological tension between the two of them, right? There is none of the high octane stuff that you think of when you think ‘thriller,’ but there is this, sense of suspense – you’re always waiting to see what happens next. Haven’t you don’t some screenwriting?

My wife is a television writer, but I haven’t done any.

Q. That’s interesting. Because it does have that very visual and propulsive sense like a screenplay. Can we expect it on Netflix anytime soon?

Wouldn’t that be nice? I’ll just say I’m talking to people.

Q. “Mouth to Mouth” has been getting mentioned as a book-to-watch, appearing on bestseller lists. How does that feel, to have it click with a wide audience?

This is just for you – ’cause I just came up with this term and maybe it’s not any good – but ‘alienated gratification.’ That’s how I would describe it.

Q. Like it’s something happening outside of yourself?

It’s gratifying to have a response, to have to know that people are reading your words, to know that it goes beyond the friend-of-friend circle, and I like hearing from readers. I’m very happy those people are having experiences with the story because that’s why I started writing. Trying to do to other people’s heads what some books did to mine. 

I think the rewards of the process are always changing. And, they’re never what you expected them to be like. When my first book came out, I thought the brass ring would be opening the box [containing the book]. So the box arrived; I opened it slightly to make sure that’s what it was, and then it sat on the kitchen table for like two or three days before I would open it.

Then I opened it and I was like, Well, I can’t change it anymore. It felt like somebody put the brakes on my process – which, who knew that would be a thing? I was just, like, what do I do now? 

Q. So the obligatory question, What are you working on next? has to be asked. The broader question might be, how do you operate in that space after a book comes out? Do you start working immediately on something new?

On the day the book came out, I went out and had a burrito and gave myself two hours to not think about what’s next. So it’s kind of always there, it’s like a conscious effort to stop thinking about writing. But I don’t have that solid a sense of what I’m working on next. I don’t think I’m a particularly intuitive person, but the process is necessarily intuitive.

Q. All right, last question, I promise. What are you reading? Or, are you reading? I mean, seriously, do you go through a phase where you just don’t read?

I’m always reading, but I do have this problem the Japanese called “tsundoku,” which is when you buy more books than you could possibly read and you let them pile up around the house. 

So I’ll read the first 50 pages of something and absolutely love it. Then I’ll get distracted and start reading something else. It’s terrible. Literally, if you asked me a few days ago what I am reading it wouldn’t have been a different answer and they’re not finished: I’m reading “So long, See You Tomorrow” by William Maxwell, I’m reading “The Man of Feeling” by Javier Marias..they’re all just piled up around here…

Oh! I’m reading “Very Cold People” by Sarah Manguso. She’s a friend of mine and an unbelievably brilliant writer. This is her first novel, it’s about a small town in the Northeast. All of this town’s problems, history and dysfunction are buried under the snow and the ice.

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