Thursday, October 13, 2022

Liarmouth. . . A Feel-Bad Romance by John Waters

 

(hb; 2022)

From the inside flap

“Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her Liarmouth—until one insane man makes her tell the truth.”

 

 

Review

Waters’s first novel reads like his best, darkly hilarious, shocking, odd, and deviant-sex movies. Marsha Sprinkle is iconoclastic to the bone, beloathed by her family and all those who know her. After a normal airport suitcase-theft job goes awry for her and her sex-enthralled flunkie, Daryl, she flees from Dutch Village, Baltimore, to Provincetown, Maryland, with people—including her cultic, bounce-obsessed daughter (Poppy), her mother (Adora), Daryl (with his compromised sex) in mostly hateful pursuit. Fast-moving, at times loosely descriptive (but always in a true-to-effective form Waters way), Liarmouth builds to a howlingly funny and morally/physically icky climax that could’ve easily been one of his early films. Worth owning, this, if you’re a fan of Waters, or occasional-gross-out/scalpel-to-cultural-norms, criminal humor.


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