Liarmouth by John Waters

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 3, 2022

Readers who want a book that mentions the male sex organ on nearly every page will fulfill their desire with Liarmouth. Daryl Hotchkins is obsessed with his penis. True, all guys share that obsession, but Daryl’s has a mind of its own. Again, that’s true of every guy’s, but Daryl’s talks. Now guys do talk to their units on occasion (usually to say something like “Calm down, buddy”) but Daryl’s talks back. Out loud, sometimes sounding like a car’s GPS.

Daryl is a petty criminal. His principal occupation is stealing luggage from airports. Daryl’s partner in crime, Marsha Sprinkle, is a more substantial sociopath. Marsha makes children cry because children annoy her. She also steals vehicles and causes general mayhem while fleeing arrest. She promised to shag Daryl to reward a year of productive work, but she has no intention of allowing Daryl, or anyone else, inside her.

The third key character is Marsha’s daughter Poppy, who operates an unlawful trampoline business, her lawful trampoline business having been shut down for violating safety protocols. Poppy has a dedicated band of followers who bounce their way through life. Poppy has replaced the seats in her van with trampolines to better transport her cultists. Marsha thinks of Poppy as “the womb-ravager.” Poppy’s attitude toward Marsha is no kinder, in part because Poppy is one of the many victims of Marsha’s thievery.

Liarmouth is, in a word, strange. In two words, strangely amusing. That won’t come as a surprise to readers who have seen John Waters’ films. Nor will the obsession with sex organs, sexuality in all of its forms, and particularly drag queens. Waters gained fame for transgressive films. His first attempt at a novel is mildly transgressive, although the boundaries have been pushed so far since Waters was in his prime that Liarmouth is fairly tame by contemporary standards of transgression.

Liarmouth has a plot, in that events follow each other in a logical cause-and-effect order. About half the plot is an extended chase scene after Daryl and Marsha are interrupted in a luggage theft at Baltimore’s airport. They go their separate ways for a time (Daryl hides out with a tickle fetishist, Marsha steals purses in a hospital after a collision that brings all the characters together), only to separate before Daryl and his talking penis can claim their reward.

The plot is freewheeling and easily sidetracked. Characters are always on the move, as Waters mocks air travel, Amtrack, and discount bus rides. Daryl’s search for his sexual payment is interrupted by his fear that his penis has turned gay. (If a man is straight but his penis is gay, the man and his penis are bisexual … or so the penis concludes.) When Marsha meets a man who is her sociopathic equal, will she finally kindle a lust for men? The reader never knows what might happen next. That’s sort of a virtue, although it gives the plot a sense of randomness. Then again, life often feels random when plans go awry.

Waters’ social commentary can be amusing, from skewering the upper class by imagining cheek lifts for dogs (maybe that’s a real thing) to using motel Magic Fingers devices as full-body vibrators. I could have done without the trampoline humor and the dick jokes get old after a hundred pages or so. My response to Liarmouth alternated between “this is sort of funny” and “this is really stupid.” The balance point is somewhere in the middle. This might have been a more effective novel if Waters had written it thirty or forty years ago, when it was still possible to shock readers.

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