Book Reviews: John Waters is Brilliant, and a New Teen Book About Bisexuals!

Truthfully, I’ve always found John Waters to be more interesting as a personality and social critic than as a filmmaker. And even if his filmmaking output has slowed (if not stopped altogether), the man is still at the peak of his observational powers in Role Models (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $15), a book of his essays just out in paperback.

The gimmick of the book is that Waters is writing about his “role models” – the people who have impressed or influenced him in some way. Some of them are people you might expect – the playwright Tennessee Williams, a porn filmmaker who shoots straight Marines getting blowjobs, one of the women involved with the Manson Family. Others are more unusual, like pop crooner Johnny Mathis and Saint Catherine of Siena.

But the subject of each essay is really just an opportunity for Water’s hilarious and alarmingly well-written flights of rhetorical fancy. For example, Waters (correctly) views Mathis as his celebrity opposite – someone who offends no one, while he notes he is “a cult filmmaker whose core audience, no matter how much I’ve crossed over, consists of minorities who can’t even fit in with their own minorities.”

He then uses the essay on Mathis to write at length on his relationship with another role model (one he clearly prefers to Mathis), Patty McCormick, who played a child sociopath in the 1950s cult classic The Bad Seed.

Waters pretends to be writing about his friends and the people he admires, but he’s really writing about himself. In an essay on his favorite designer, Rei Kawakubo, an apparent master of the trashy, unkempt look, Waters is really telling us how, over the years, he assembled his own very indelible, and deliberate, public fashion image (including the hilarious secret of his trademark pencil mustache).

And in an essay on several fringe pornographers, Waters takes us on a journey into his own very specific (and again, hilarious) sexual desires and his take on sexuality in general (not surprisingly, he thinks we’d all be better off if people embraced, not disowned, their perversions).

But for some reason, none of this comes across as self-absorbed. Throughout the book, Waters is completely frank about his weird and wonderful interests, but what really makes it work is a defiantly outsider’s perspective that isn't simultaneously hostile or pretentious or angry. Unlike a lot of "alternative" posers, Waters isn't saying and doing what he says and does simply to shock people.

Well, okay, maybe he’s partly trying to shock people.

The point is, Waters is surprisingly accessible and down-to-earth in his obscure fringe interests and counter-culture perspective.

In the end, he comes across as remarkably self-aware, very compassionate, and almost stunningly sane. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to think to yourself, “The world is a much better place because John Waters exists.”

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One of the many skills of author Alex Sanchez has been his uncanny ability to predict timely issues with his books for teenagers and package them in an accessible, readable way.

He did it with his break-out book The Rainbow Boys, the first in the early 00s wave of popular gay teen novels. He did it with So Hard to Say, a landmark middle grade novel about a 13-year-old gay boy just coming to terms with his sexuality. And he did it with The God Box, his 2007 novel which directly took on the struggle between religion and homosexuality many teens feel.

Now, with another book that is perfectly in tune with a zeitgeist that includes a growing awareness of bisexuality, Sanchez’s latest release is Boyfriends with Girlfriends (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, $16.99).

As he’s done with many of his books, Boyfriends with Girlfriends tells its story in alternating viewpoints. But here the characters are a gay boy, a bisexual boy, a lesbian girl, and another girl who is questioning her sexuality.

Alex has included bisexuals in his books before (one of the characters in his Rainbow series is bisexual), but there have been very, very few teen books that have so directly taken on the concerns of bisexuals themselves: the prejudice of parents, the feeling that others are forcing them to “choose,” the biphobia they experience even from gay people.

As with all the previous Sanchez books, this is a cleanly-written, very readable, slightly soap opera-y story that takes the concerns of teenagers seriously while also always being firmly age-appropriate in terms of content and sexuality.

Sanchez continues to break new ground. His fans will not be disappointed.

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Even though it’s not gay, I promised readers I’d give my assessment of The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss (Daw Books, $29.95), the sequel to a fantasy novel called The Name of the Wind, which I really enjoyed. Many have called the author “the next George R.R. Martin,” which is extremely high praise in fantasy literary circles.

I confess: I didn’t like The Wise Man's Fear at all. The book received a starred (rave) review from Publisher’s Weekly, and it’s one of those cases where I’m thinking, “Did that reviewer read the same book I did?”

In The Wise Man’s Fear, Rothfuss gives into all his worst impulses: he’s created a meandering, overwritten book that barely moves the story forward, despite being more than a thousand pages long.

The main character, Kvothe, is telling the story of his life. But incredibly, after two very long books, he’s still in college and still barely 17-years-old.

Rothfuss is clearly a good storyteller: he creates great characters and a wonderful sense of atmosphere, and his prose is always readable. But in this case, he’s become yet another fantasy writer who’s fallen in love with his own fantasy world and lost all sense of perspective. As much as it saddens me to say, I simply can’t recommend this one.

Next Page! A warped and wonderful gay comic!