Nathaniel Rich Slips Elliott Bay Some Tongue Monday Night

For a first novel, Nathaniel Rich's The Mayor's Tongue makes for a good read. But even though he's "not yet 30," he is a senior editor at The Paris Review (and the author of San Francisco Noir), and so you do expect him not to offer you some rewarmed Roth in the first place. He's down at Elliott Bay Book Company on Monday night, April 21st, giving the usual free reading/Q&A and not fielding questions about what it's like having Frank Rich as a father.

While Rich claims to have stolen from a long list of literary forebears--"Flann O’Brien, Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Dickens, Italo Svevo, Stephen King, Kazuo Ishiguro, Katherine Dunn, and Arrian’s history of Alexander the Great"-- he leaves out Kafka, and we also kept thinking of Saul Bellow, another famously conflicted escapist whose appetites and obsessions warp the firmaments of his novels.

Rich's novel's structure features a lot of opportunities for what the Stranger's Brendan Kiley might call "high-minded jive," but what makes it tick--nah, not tick, that's too mechanical--what makes it live and breathe is the all-too-human difficulty of communication. (Rich also steals the communication vehicles of his forebears--in this world, phones barely exist, let alone cell phones, and almost everything is sent by printed letter or postcard.)

The protagonist, Eugene Brentani, isn't really talking to his father. He's working as a furniture mover, and mistranslating the novel of an immigrant friend, Alvaro. A WWII veteran, Mr. Schmitz, only speaks to his wife at night. When his oldest friend Rutherford moves to Italy, their correspondence is troubled by their decrepitude. Eugene meets a biographer who thinks he's still getting letters from a famously hard-living writer the world thinks is dead. The biographer is hard of hearing. The literary lion, naturally, in self-imposed exile.