Review: Geek Love by Katharine Dunn

Title: Geek Love
Author: Katharine Dunn
Genre: contemporary fiction
Grade: A+
Reason for Reading: Honestly? I wanted something that wasn’t a romance, and I’d read this book before, so I decided to go with my random yen to reread it.

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

The novel is the story of a traveling circus run by Aloysius “Al” Binewski and his wife, “Crystal” Lil. When Al’s circus begins to fail, the couple devise an idea to breed their own freak show, using various drugs and radioactive material to alter the genes of their children. Who emerges are Arturo (”Arty”), a boy with flippers for hands and feet; Electra (”Elly”) and Iphigenia (”Iphy”) the Siamese Twins; Olympia (”Oly”) the hunchback albino dwarf; and Fortunato (”Chick”), the normal looking telekinetic baby of the family — as well as a number of still-borns kept preserved in jars in a special wing of the freak show. The story is told by Oly in the form of a novel written for her daughter Miranda.

My Thoughts: A word of warning: This is not a romance. There is no HEA. There are casual mentions of rape, incest, torture and murder within these pages. This is one of those novels that genre writers like to pick on when they talk about literary fiction. But I love it, precisely because of the fact that it’s a macabre, gruesome book.

The story centers around the Binewski family, who own a traveling carnival. Father Al and mother Lil have decided it is economical and profitable to breed their own freaks, and so they do. There is Arturo, the Aqua Boy, who has flippers for hands and feet. There are the twins, Electra and Iphigenia, Siamese twins, Olympia, the book’s narrator, who feels that as an albino hunchback dwarf her freakishness is rather prosaic, and then there’s Fortunato, who is perhaps the strangest out of all of them. The Binewskis on the surface seem to be a typical nuclear family–well, apart from the fact that they set out to breed freakish children–and then the reader is drawn beneath the surface and gradually the picture that is revealed turns out not to be very pretty.

It’s hard to describe exactly what it is about this book that works so well for me, but I think that, in essence, it’s the writing style. By turns it is lyrical and vulgar, and the combination is oddly compelling. Dunn has a deft hand at characterization, too, and describes her characters with an economy of words that nonetheless brings them to life. For example, she says of Arturo: “His favorite trick at the ages of three and four was to put his face close to the glass, bulging his eyes out at the audience, opening and closing his mouth like a river bass, and then to turn his back and paddle off, revealing the turd trailing from his muscular little buttocks. Al and Lil laughed about it later, but at the time it caused them great consternation as well as the nuisance of sterilizing the tank more often than usual. As the years passed, Arty donned trunks and became more sophisticated, but it’s been said, with some truth, that his attitude never really changed.” And my other favorite quote is in reference to the Chick: “The dumb little fuck was supposed to be so goddamn sensitive, how come he couldn’t figure it out? All he had to do to make me like him was need me. All he had to do to make Arty like him was drop dead.”

The plot here is like a trainwreck. It is told alternately during the present day and in flashbacks as Olympia remembers her life. We can tell right away that life has been neither easy nor kind to Oly, but the journey to the point where everything falls apart for her is still a compelling read. Most of the compellingness of the plot has to do with the sheer train-wreck potential that these characters are. Reading about them is like watching a freak show–you’re not quite sure what they’re going to do, but you’re fairly certain it won’t be ordinary or forgetable. This is also one of maybe three books ever that succeeded in making me cry. I count that as a positive, since it demonstrates that Ms. Dunn did an excellent job with characterization.

I’m still not entirely sure that I’ve articulated all the things I love about this book, but if you’re up for an odd, visceral read, this is definitely the book to try.