The Mayor's Tongue, by Nathaniel Rich
by Celeste Ng
Near the beginning of Nathaniel Rich’s debut novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, a young man named Eugene reads a novella by his idol, the legendary author Constance Eakins. “[It] was typical Eakins,” Eugene reflects, “a strange reality that bordered on fantasy, an exotic locale, larger-than-life characters.” He might have been describing The Mayor’s Tongue itself, a book so dizzyingly rich with surprises that no review could—or should—describe them all.
