Geek Love
- Dec 8, 2017
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
Though released in 1989 while I was still in high school, I don’t recall Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love hitting my radar until I’d arrived at Indiana University a couple of years later and it was all abuzz in my social circles. Unfortunately, I never got around to reading it at the time, and eventually I forgot all about it. That is, until a few months ago, when my memory was jogged while watching the prematurely-aborted HBO series Carnivàle. (Yes, I was reminded of a 28-year-old book while watching a 14-year-old TV show. I am so bleeding edge.) In any event, after finishing American Fire, I had planned to read one of the few early Stephen King novels I never got around to (The Shining), so that I could read its sequel, Doctor Sleep. For some reason I couldn’t do it, and, after all these years, Katherine Dunn’s novel finally got its turn.
Geek Love is largely the history—and interpersonal struggles, tragedies, and Machiavellian schemings—of a traveling carnival once run by Aloysius and Lil Binewski, who, through the use of drugs and radioactive material to alter the genes of their children, birthed their own freak show: Arturo, aka “Aqua Boy,” with flippers in place of arms and legs; Electra and Iphigenia, Siamese twins; Olympia, a hunchback albino dwarf (and the narrator of our story); and Fortunato, aka “Chick,” a normal-looking boy with telekinetic powers. But Geek Love is also a present-day story about Olympia’s daughter Miranda, who, in addition to being unaware of her mother’s identity, has a special defect of her own; a wealthy woman, Mary Lick, who has offered Miranda a substantial amount of money to have her “defect” removed; and Olympia’s plan to stop Lick and protect her daughter. I wish I could say otherwise, but the latter is as convoluted and half-baked as the former is robust and tantalizing.
I wish I could say that the problems stopped there, but they don’t. For starters, there’s no added value with the second storyline, and I struggled to figure out the thought process that led to its inclusion. Second, it’s not apparent until two-thirds of the way through the book that Olympia is writing the family’s history for, and to, her daughter. This construct, and its late arrival, feels as unnecessary as the second storyline. Finally, at around the same time we learn the story is being written to Miranda, third-person accounts of carnival goings-on from the notes of a hanger-on journalist begin appearing, which feel as out of left field as the other aforementioned weaknesses.
Don’t get me wrong: Geek Love is full of inventive, skillfully written, richly detailed, and, for many readers, disturbing storytelling. It’s also a mess that begs for a stronger editorial hand. Never before have I read a book whose flaws were so conspicuous and the ways to fix them so obvious. And never before have I been so angry at a book for falling short of what might—no, what should—have been.
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