I have stated repeatedly throughout this blog that when I start a book, I always finish it. It doesn’t matter how much I may dislike the book at first, I always sweat it out till the end. In spite of this optimistic policy, I don’t recall ever being impressed by a book that had such an inauspicious start. A bad book from the start is a bad book until the end. And Liarmouth…A Feel-Bad Romance by John Waters, was a sorrowful waste of five days of my life. Any other book that is a mere 240 pages would take me only three days–tops–to finish. I needed five days to get through this, Waters’s first novel. It was so bad I had no desire to read it beyond my time eating breakfast.
My blog features four other books by Waters, so I love his work. I have also read his earlier works before I started writing book reviews in 2010, so I am definitely a fan. The only negative comment I had was in Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America, where I felt he cheated the reader by puffing two-thirds of the book up with fictional hitchhiking stories instead of writing about his own experiences. His life is way more interesting than anything he could write about as fiction, so I gathered he didn’t have enough real stories to tell so had to invent some. As a fiction writer, Waters wasn’t fun to read.
Liarmouth was trying to be funny yet was so bad I never even laughed out loud, not even once. I always have moments of nutcase delirium when I read his work. In this case I kept saying to myself This book is so unfunny. John Waters should stick to writing nonfiction. When I have to write reviews of awful books I don’t even want to revisit the storyline and characters. I could do without writing a review at all. I just want to get the book out of my house as soon as possible. In this case, Liarmouth covers what is trademark John Waters: kinky paraphilia, a cult of bounce enthusiasts, a talking penis, a plastic surgeon to dogs, and of course the title liarmouth, Marsha Sprinkle, who is an airport baggage thief and master of disguise.
The book was easier to take if I read it while imagining Waters’s voice. I could picture him on a talk show regaling the audience with a funny story and if I read the book in his voice I could distance myself from the active reading experience. I could tell that the observations made by some of the characters were classic Waters opinions, such as this one by Marsha about Uber drivers:
“Marsha exits the airport and wouldn’t you know it? Not a cab in sight. Just clueless relatives dropping off confused un-frequent flier family members or smug passengers thinking they’re oh-so-modern hopping out of Uber vehicles. Marsha hopes to never have to use such a service! No thank you to some unemployed bum with too much time on his hands behind the wheel of some about-to-be-repossessed midsize sedan. A driver that can actually rate her! Can you imagine such a thing? What ever happened to the customer is always right? That’s what she’d like to know.”
I will bet that Waters has never taken a ride with Uber, nor will.
Liarmouth was an awful book. If I was Waters’s editor and he handed the manuscript to me, I’d thrust it back with a Connie Marble flourish and tell him to go back to the dungeon and start all over again.