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I finished Katherine Dunn's Geek Love last week. I was looking for a book that would really grab me, and this certainly fit the bill. It's the story of a group of siblings whose parents strategically use drugs and poisons and radiation and whatever else they can think of to produce a family of sideshow exhibits. Arty has flippers instead of arms and legs, Iphy and Elly are beautiful Siamese twins, Oly is an albino hunchbacked dwarf, and Chick is something else entirely. The premise is bizarre, and Dunn is not shy about presenting the more off-putting aspects of her characters, in terms of both physicality and personality. In fact, her commitment to the grotesque is rather impressive -- it runs all through the plot and even filters down into her word choice: in this book, nothing is simply ejected when it could be belched, spewed, vomited, or shat out; nothing is merely yellow-green when it could be the color of bile or pus... It spite of all this, I was amazed at how quickly it all started to seem normal to me.
The book actually has two story-lines, one concerning the history of the Binewski siblings during the time they traveled with their parents' carnival, and the other dealing with Oly's post-carnival existence. There is plenty of suspense in both stories, but I have to say that the story of the adult Oly feels a little bit thin in comparison to her earlier days. I found that a bit disappointing because I wanted to know more about what it was like for Oly to reconcile her history with the world of "normal" people in which she finds herself. Why does she keep the secrets she keeps? Why does she guard them so closely? That was the stuff that I was really intrigued by, but it seemed that Dunn was more interested in the strange and over-the-top elements of her story.
It's not all just weird and extreme, however. Even in the midst of the most carnivalesque excess, the book is essentially about the blindness of utter devotion and the need from which it springs. It's easy to get caught up in this book, first in the strangeness and the humor, and then in the sense of foreboding that grows as things slowly begin to go bad, but every time you look underneath the fancy surface you're faced with the black hole of Oly's love for Arty. It's powerful, it's tragic, it's horrifying, and it is the engine that drives this book down to it's inevitable end.
The book actually has two story-lines, one concerning the history of the Binewski siblings during the time they traveled with their parents' carnival, and the other dealing with Oly's post-carnival existence. There is plenty of suspense in both stories, but I have to say that the story of the adult Oly feels a little bit thin in comparison to her earlier days. I found that a bit disappointing because I wanted to know more about what it was like for Oly to reconcile her history with the world of "normal" people in which she finds herself. Why does she keep the secrets she keeps? Why does she guard them so closely? That was the stuff that I was really intrigued by, but it seemed that Dunn was more interested in the strange and over-the-top elements of her story.
It's not all just weird and extreme, however. Even in the midst of the most carnivalesque excess, the book is essentially about the blindness of utter devotion and the need from which it springs. It's easy to get caught up in this book, first in the strangeness and the humor, and then in the sense of foreboding that grows as things slowly begin to go bad, but every time you look underneath the fancy surface you're faced with the black hole of Oly's love for Arty. It's powerful, it's tragic, it's horrifying, and it is the engine that drives this book down to it's inevitable end.
