Book Review: Geek Love - Katherine Dunn

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I am re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews.

On this final morning I’m taking a step into the bizarre with Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Read: January 2008

Geek Love in one tweet-sized chunk:
Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family’, Geek Love is defined not by its freak-show setting, but the common humanity inherent within.

“'When your mama was a geek, my dreamlets’, Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around, hypnotised with longing.”

Despite its freak show characters and setting, Geek Love is one of the most tender-hearted novels you could hope to read. It works because at no point is it sick, grotesque, tasteless or glibly shocking. Katherine Dunn’s talent is in making this very remarkable story feel like the most natural thing in the world. And it is. Because Geek Love is a novel about families, and individuals within families, and the crazy world which exists outside them.

Narrated by Olympia, a bald, hunchback, albino, dwarf, Geek Love tells the story of the Binewski family, and their rise to fame. For Al and Lil Binewski have grander plans than circus geeking for their Binewski Fabulon troupe. Together they hit upon the idea of breeding their own freak show. So during each pregnancy Lil guzzles drugs and pesticides, douses herself in radiation, all in the hope of producing freaks compelling and original enough to keep the circus afloat. Giving new meaning to the term ‘nuclear family,’ Lil gives birth to 5 living children, each fantastic in their own unique way. First out comes the limbless Arturo, Aqua Boy, megalomaniac, entertainer, preacher and eventually, cult leader. He is followed by the musically talented Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia, beautiful and alluring and each as individual as they are united. The Lizard Girl comes third, green tinted and with one tail shaped leg but she dies suddenly and mysteriously aged 2. And then there is Olympia, unremarkable, unprofitable, who sleeps under the sink. Finally comes Fortunato, almost rejected for his apparent normality, he turns out to possess strange telekinetic powers and an angelic temperament. Led by this motley crew of performers, the circus grows beyond all recognition, raking in audiences in ever greater numbers.

But as within any family there are internal tensions, people pulling in opposite directions, and Arturo will not quit until the whole family is subjected to his twisted, power-crazed ways.

Most characters in novels act as personified ideas, or plot developers. It is rare to find a family whose entire dynamic just exists, naturally and without pretence. And it is all the more remarkable since the characters in question are, physically at least, far from the norm.

With a constantly evolving plot, complex and engaging characters and easily readable style, Geek Love is a book to become thoroughly engrossed in. The characters are as fabulously drawn as any I have read, equal even to those in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. They each inhabit their own skin and minds completely, think independently and diversely. You can almost picture their bodies in the shape of the words, living, breathing, dreaming, loving, hating. From the cold-hearted, vindictive sneer of Arturo to the loving honesty of Fortunato, the independent personalities of the twins and the unrequited love of Olympia, it is impossible not to love them all. Love them because in each of them lies that spark of recognisable complex humanity that is so rarely found in literature.

The whole basis of Geek Love is the inversion of society’s view of physical perfection. Despite their external differences the Binewski children do not grow up shunted, embarrassed or gawked at. They are treasured, worshipped, made special by their different forms. Al refers to them as his ‘rose garden’ his little ‘dreamlets’. They look down upon the ‘norms,’ pity all those whose bodies are unremarkable and whose lives are so much harder because of it. Indeed, their hierarchy is based upon the scale of abnormality, a scale in which Olympia is considered the lowest and Arturo the highest form of creation.

Geek Love doesn’t warn against judging character by its skin. It is not as simple as that. Rather it gets under that skin, into the life and mindset of its characters, rejecting the very notion of physical normality. Utterly original, it is a cult piece of literature which deserves to be read even more widely than it currently is.

8.5 out of 10

The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

You know the feeling of sticking your hand in a sack of grain? The engulfing sense of texture that surrounds your fingers, comfortingly close, smooth yet strangely rough, tactile and claustrophobic, and ultimately entirely satisfying. Donna Tartt’s prose is like that. Her plots are dense, with so many themes tied together that it can feel as though the events are crowding around you, happening just out of your sight. There is no other author who so easily marries excitement and intrigue with sumptuous description and literary reference. As it was with The Secret History, so it is with The Little Friend. There is something for absolutely everyone here, whether you are looking for the excitement of a murder mystery or the insight and subtle illusions of literary fiction.

With The Secret History, Donna Tartt achieved the unusual combination of critical acclaim and international success. Her second novel, The Little Friend, a decade in the writing, was finally published in 2002. It tells the tale of Harriet, a precocious twelve year old whose once wealthy family is still reeling from the death of her older brother Robin when she was a baby. Since then her father has moved to another city, her mother can barely raise herself from bed long enough to smoke a cigarette and her elder sister Alison is so timid she barely says a word. So Harriet, accompanied by her only friend Hely, sets out to solve the riddle of Robin’s mysterious murder and reap vengeance on the man she suspects. But with her comfortable family life falling apart all around her Harriet is forced to face up to the adult world, with all its complexity and ambiguity. The result is a delicious journey through the internal world of a twelve year old girl, as she struggles to locate her place in the wider world.

The complex plot and myriad themes keep the reader guessing to the end but this is a less intense offering than The Secret History. At 555 pages of tiny print it is far longer and much slower. Much of it is taken up with building the setting and developing a real sense of the characters and their small Mississippi town. Harriet is brilliantly construed, her thought process and intense emotions feel incredibly familiar and believable.

However, it is also a little too long and there are passages in the middle which you feel could have been better edited. It is not as good as The Secret History, partly because the claustrophobia and mystery is often broken by the slow pace. However, as it builds to its convergent climax the last hundred or so pages are as good as anything she has written and the lack of a conclusive ending leaves the reader guessing. Donna Tartt has claimed that she does reveal the identity of Robin’s murder somewhere in the plot, but if that is the case then few people have discovered the answer. That is one of the best things about this, the density of plot construction and sheer number of recurring ideas mean this is a book to read and then reread again and again. Donna Tartt is a joy to read, one of the best present day writers anywhere in the world. Read her stuff…read it now!

7 out of 10

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a review as: “a critical appraisal.” The word ‘critical’ implying an inherent need to assess faults as well as strengths. This creates a problem for anyone seeking to review The Secret History because to my mind it is almost faultless. There can have been few more universally acclaimed novels written in the last fifty years.

Struggling to find his way at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds himself drawn towards a group of privileged students studying in a sequestered ancient Greek class under the tutelage of the eccentric Julian Marrow. They study everything – from the furies to Plato – and with a thirst for knowledge which Richard has never encountered before, intent on recreating the past in everything they do. But as they become increasingly immersed in the classical world of their imaginations they become obsessed with the idea that to be free one must lose themselves completely, as Euripides puts it to be “more like deer than human beings.” In search of this they begin to push the boundaries further and further and in doing so become embroiled in a complex web of deceit which threatens to destroy them all.

Set amidst the claustrophobic gothic setting of a New England college this is a psychological tale of friendship and murder. Donna Tartt has created one of those rare books; an intelligent and complex literary novel, beautifully written and wonderfully portrayed yet which remains eminently and delightfully readable. The characters are intimately and realistically drawn, so believable you feel as though you have known them for years. During the rare moments I was able to lift my head from the page and engage with the real world I found myself discussing their personality traits as though they were old friends, such is the ability of the author to draw the reader in and make them feel truly part of the action. There are few more intense or claustrophobic works and the effect of this is to surround the reader, at once both inviting and threatening and the only way out is to keep reading, until the events have run their course and you can finally recommence your everyday life.

The style of writing is thick and tactile, satisfying in an all encompassing way which few writers can achieve. And it is wonderfully beautiful. But as the characters observe, beauty is terror, and there’s plenty here of each. Take this fabulous passage:

“After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful we quiver before it.

That night I wrote in my journal: ‘Trees are schizophrenic now and beginning to lose control, enraged with the shock of their fiery new colours. Someone – was it van Gogh? – said that orange is the colour of insanity. Beauty is terror. We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.’”

Such passionate, absorbent and sensuous prose, The Secret History is simply a joy to read. Donna Tartt has created a masterpiece. This is a modern classic drawn from antiquity that will take you on a journey of epic proportions.

Okay, I have found a criticism for this most exquisite of books: at six-hundred pages it is not nearly long enough. I wanted it to go on forever. Hinc illae lacrimae. Hence these tears.


10 out of 10