WATCH YOUR MOUTH by Daniel Handler
ISBN: 006093817X
Format: Paperback, 232pp
Pub. Date: March 2002
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Daniel Handler is a talented writer. How else could he come up with a novel, which is written both in the form of an opera and then written like a self-help book? How can it be deeply erotic, funny, disturbing and scary at the same time? He is a genius that is how.
Watch Your Mouth tells the story of Joseph, a young college student, spending the summer at his girlfriend Cyn’s parents’ house outside Pittsburgh, while he and Cyn work at a day camp for young Jewish kids, Camp Shalom. The Glass family are a very odd bunch with Mimi, the mother, working for an opera house that’s producing a series of anti-Semitic operas; Ben, the father, is a Orthopedic Surgeon recovering from a failure, that resulted in a patient’s bone cracking in half; Stephen, Cyn’s brother, who a science geek who works at Carnegie Mellon; Then there is, Cyn, the vixen herself who lured our hero into her strange family’s house, so Joseph and Cyn could have sex all summer long. That part, Joseph was okay with. I have to credit Handler with writing openly about young lust and sex. He doesn’t spare the details.
But Joseph stumbles on the family secret; actually it’s not much of a secret because each family member rationalizes to Joseph, how having sex with a family member is okay. Cyn wants Ben, Ben wants Cyn, Stephen wants Cyn and Mimi wants Stephen. Then Joseph starts hearing sounds in the middle of the night and the Glass family has given into their-disturbing-fantasies.
With that, Watch Your Mouth, turns into a thrilling novel where the body count is high due to a wronged family member with a interest an Jewish Folklore (see: Golem) and Joseph is on the run for his life trying to recover from a horrifying summer that once looked so great.
Watch Your Mouth is a great book that can be confusing sometimes, because Joseph doesn’t quite believe what’s happening in front of his eyes. But Handler, known to the world as Lemony Snicket, is a truly talented author with a wicked wit and a taste for black humor.
