Watch Your Mouth: A Novel

In Watch Your Mouth, Daniel Handler takes "different" to a whole new level.... The novel frames an erotically charged Pittsburgh summer as an opera in four acts, complete with overtures and leitmotifs.

Handler places a visiting college student named Joseph inside the Glass family home on Byron Circle, where domestic life veers into shocking intimacies. The sweltering household surrounds him with a disgraced bone specialist, an opera propsmistress, and a teenage brother lost in laboratory experiments.

The narrative orchestrates each domestic disaster with mordant wit and sharp theatrical irony.

• Dark Comedy: Joseph balances an uneasy summer romance with counselor duties at Camp Shalom, where macaroni-covered challah covers and a camp-wide God’s Eyes craze provide comic relief.
• Magical Realism: Ancient Jewish folklore bleeds into modern suburbia when a monstrous golem, sculpted from river clay in the family basement, stalks the Glass household.
• Unreliable Narrator: Joseph recounts escalating domestic horrors through theatrical stage directions and operatic motifs, leaving readers to question whether the nightmare is real or a product of his guilty imagination.
• Satirical Fiction: The second half of the novel subverts self-help conventions as Joseph navigates a chaotic twelve-step recovery program across California strip malls and a luxury island resort.
• Also by This Author: The Basic Eight and Adverbs.