“Liarmouth,” he says with a missing-tooth grin. Liarmouth? That’s even better! Say it again, she begs him inside her head. He does. Only this time he pauses teasingly between syllables. “Liar…mouth,” he whispers, daring her dishonesty to rise up from her throat again. How can one word, even one made up from two separate words put together, melt away her lifetime of carnal caution, she wonders silently.
I was looking for something mindless, hopefully something entertaining, so why not John Waters’ first novel Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance? I knew what I was getting into with Waters — in the early days of VCRs, my friends and I would watch rented tapes of Polyester and the original Hairspray on repeat — but while this was campy with bizarre details, I don’t think it went far enough for my tastes: not truly transgressive or envelope-pushing, it almost felt like the world has moved on and Waters is still telling the same dirty jokes from the 1980s. Not a waste of my time — I did have some laughs and cringes — and fans of Waters’ films will no doubt enjoy the cinematic beats of the storyline even more than I did. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“We all gotta make a living,” Daryl says with a shrug as he puts the final feather handcuff around Ritchie’s wrist. Christ, he thinks as he looks around at all the creepy framed Tickle Me Elmo portraits hanging on the walls, what a conman has to do to hide out from the police these days.
Sexpot forty-something Marsha Sprinkle is a liar and a hustler — squatting in foreclosed McMansions, fencing items from stolen luggage — and after promising to sleep with her partner in crime, Daryl, if he posed as her chauffeur for a year, the year is up, Daryl is, um, impassioned, and Marsha has no intention of honouring her deal. When they go to the airport to make what Marsha decides will be their final heist as a team, the con goes wrong, the pair run from the police in opposite directions, and the plot becomes a gonzo planes, trains, and automobiles road trip with Marsha trying to get to her ex-husband for overdue revenge and Daryl trying to get to Marsha. Along the way they cross paths with: a tickle fetishist; a hobo kidnapper; outlaw trampoline radicals on the run; an unlicensed pet plastic surgeon; a psychic talking penis; bouncers, flouncers, rimmers, and frotterers. Just about everyone is trying to have alternative sexy time, but when an act occurs, it felt kind of charming:
In. Out. Not like that burger place in L.A., but like a souped-up piston that grinds to perfection. She’s the master. He’s the johnson. And together they redefine human sexual response.
As for my feeling that Waters was stuck in time: He still populates his storytelling with cartoonish drag queens, overweight women, and transvestite sex workers. His cultural references run along the lines of Evel Knieval, Uri Geller, the Amazing Kreskin, and the “diet doctor murderess” Jean Harris; references I get because I was also alive in the 70s. But he also hearkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, with one chapter alone using Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Janet Leigh, and Tippi Hedren to make analogies; and, yes, I know who they are but they just don’t feel relevant. He discusses kinks like a naughty schoolboy, without actually showing much, and as the plot eventually takes on some fantastical/magical realism elements (that make for undoubtedly cinematic mental visuals), I didn’t feel a lot of tension in the plot despite this sort of thing:
Marsha Sprinkle may have accidentally outfoxed them once with the tricky little ambulance maneuver but that will be the last time she escapes. The last time she steals. The last time she’ll be a bad parent. The last time she doesn’t respect her own mother. The last time she stiffs a stiffie of his rightful wage. Today will be Marsha Sprinkle’s last day on earth, period.
Like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with poop and penis jokes, this ultimately did fit the bill as mindless and mostly entertaining, but this would probably be of more value to someone who has followed Waters’ career more closely than I have. Good, not great.
